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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19235

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
Beware the fortune tellers peddling genetic tests
BMJ 2011 Jan 6; 342:
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c7233.extract


Abstract:

We need urgently to evaluate and regulate the next wave of overmedicalisation

An enduring memory of my niece’s third birthday party is the fortune telling session that took place under the dining room table. A creative parent had donned a headscarf and extravagant earrings, and soon a line of toddlers were waiting to hear about the magic of their future. Given the state of the science a decade later it’s highly possible that this fortune telling was just as reliable as the high tech horoscopes arising from the marketing of genetic tests for common diseases.

When the US Government Accountability Office recently ran a covert operation on genetic tests for 15 common conditions, including Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer, and restless legs syndrome, it uncovered the most extraordinary mess. 1 It found that identical DNA samples produced wildly contradictory results. One donor was told by four different firms that he was at below average risk, average risk, and above average risk of having high blood pressure and prostate cancer.

Its report concluded that genetic tests marketed directly to the public were “misleading and of little or no practical use.” Yet hundreds of thousands …

 

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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