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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18281

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

[No authors listed].
A look back at 2009: one step forward, two steps back.
Prescrire Int 2010 Apr; 19:(106):89-94
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20568499


Abstract:

In 2009, we examined 104 new brand name products or new indications for existing products in the French edition of Prescrire. Only 3 of these 104 “innovations” provided some therapeutic advantage, while 19 had clearly unfavourable risk-benefit balances. Marketing authorisations are failing to adequately protect patients. A number of cheaper generic versions of useful drugs were introduced to the market, while BigPharma’s anticompetitive practices were aimed at slowing the growth of generics manufacturers. The quality of over-the-counter drugs marketed for self-medication, especially “umbrella” brands, left much to be desired. Consumer protection is clearly not the primary concern of the European (EMA) and French (Afssaps) drug regulatory agencies. They remain too financially dependent on drug companies; hesitate to withdraw dangerous drugs from the market; and withhold drug safety data. Other signs of drug companies’ excessive influence, at patients’ expense, include drug pricing that bears little relation to therapeutic advantage (in oncology, for example); the financial dependence of many patient groups on drug companies; the European Commission’s attempts to authorise direct-to-consumer advertising and to allow the pharmaceutical sector to tighten its grip on health information, including pharmacovigilance data. Governments must assume their responsibilities, and patients and the healthcare profession must resist BigPharma’s increasing involvement in all spheres of patient care.

 

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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