Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18061

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Sibbald B
Alberta MDs irate over prescribing privacy issue
CMAJ 2003 Nov 11; 169:(10):1066
http://www.cmaj.ca/cgi/content/full/169/10/1066

Abstract:

Much to the chagrin of the Alberta Medical Association, a major collector of health data has “flip-flopped” on its previous policy and no longer allows doctors to refuse to share their drug-prescribing information with the company.

Until Sept. 9, IMS Health (Canada) allowed physicians, through its voluntary privacy code, to request that their information not be sold. IMS collects prescribing data from pharmacies, then sells it to pharmaceutical companies that in turn target high prescribers. Since IMS voluntarily initiated this opt-out policy in 1996, the company has received only a handful of requests. But that changed Aug. 28, when the AMA sent a letter urging all its member physicians to opt out. …

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909