Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19169

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

Parker MH, Wardle JL, Weir M, Stewart CL
Medical merchants: conflict of interest, office product sales and notifiable conduct
Med J Aust 2011; 194:(1):34-37
http://www.mja.com.au/public/issues/194_01_030111/par10613_fm.html

Abstract:

Professional ethical codes identify the issue of conflict of interest, which can distort doctors’ objective judgements concerning the best interests of patients.
Legal fiduciary duties may be owed by doctors to patients in situations of potential conflict of interest.
Prescribing and dispensing functions have been largely legally separated to prevent conflicts of interest arising.
The advent of integrative medicine has been accompanied by an apparent growth of in-house selling of therapeutic products.
Medical merchandising constitutes a prima-facie conflict of interest and may amount to notifiable conduct under the Health Practitioner Regulation National Law provisions.
We believe that doctors who sell therapeutic products should adhere to strict conditions to avoid significantly departing from accepted professional standards.
Doctors who have a reasonable belief that a colleague is failing to comply with these conditions could consider notifying the Medical Board of Australia.

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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