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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 18983

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: news

Jack A
Drug groups to limit medicine ‘sampling’
The Finanical Times 2010 Jun 24
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/345d4c0c-7eed-11df-8398-00144feabdc0.html


Abstract:

Member companies will pledge to limit “sampling” or giving free medicines to doctors to four packets per doctor, and for no longer than two years after the launch of a new drug.

The practice – widespread in the US, where a recent estimated suggested companies provided $3bn at market priced of samples each year – has been criticised for distorting prescribing away from the most clinically appropriate or affordable treatments.

It has been particularly important in the past in the US where so many patients have to pay for their own treatment, but has also comes under scrutiny in Europe where most medicines are paid for by governments or insurers as a form of marketing.

The new “four by two” sampling ceiling agreed by the trade body would restrict such gifts, leaving just enough to give doctors a chance to see and try new treatments.

 

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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