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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18916

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

Moynihan R
Drug firm’s legal action against government advisers is described as 'intimidation'
BMJ 2010 Nov 17; 341:
http://www.bmj.com/content/341/bmj.c6527.extract


Abstract:

The drug company AstraZeneca has launched legal action against an influential committee of independent advisers to the Australian government.

Documents lodged with a federal court show that the company has begun proceedings against 17 members of the Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee and the federal health minister.

Neither AstraZeneca nor the government will comment on the nature of the case against the powerful committee, which makes recommendations on which drugs attract subsidies-and the conditions attached to those subsidies-in Australia’s £4bn (€4.7bn; $6.4bn) publicly …

 

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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963