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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18265

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

Ed.
Whose interests does the World Trade Organization serve
Lancet 2003 Jan 25;
http://www.lancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(03)12360-4/fulltext


Abstract:

Those who support increasing access to medicines for the poor have lost, for now, to those more interested in protecting the patents owned by the US pharmaceutical industry. At a World Trade Organization (WTO) meeting in Geneva on Dec 20, 2002, the USA refused to support a draft plan to let developing countries override patent laws and import cheap generic drugs. The other WTO member countries accepted the proposals, after protracted negotiations, but the US delegation rejected them, saying that the proposed wording for the global deal failed to protect patents on drugs for non-infectious diseases such as asthma, diabetes, and obesity, which the delegation said would undermine research and development.

 

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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