corner
Healthy Skepticism
Join us to help reduce harm from misleading health information.
Increase font size   Decrease font size   Print-friendly view   Print
Register Log in

Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20059

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: Magazine

Hart D
Stand up for doctors' integrity
Australian Doctor 2006 Aug 1827


Full text:

Editor It is the final straw when I hear that the CPD program may be in difficulty due to the supposed intervention of the drug companies (‘Hospitality crackdown threatens CPD’, 4 August). When is someone in our profession bodies going to stand up and take it to the reporters and pollies who are knocking us?

What, at the end of the day, is a political lobbyist other than someone who has their own agenda with the pollies and wants their opinion to the fore.

What are all these donations to the political parties about? Does anyone really believe that they are from a kind benefactor with no axe to grind? I don’t think so.

So when the pollies talk about my $10 lunch from one of the drug reps, I have a suggestion of where to stick it, and it would need surgical removal.

If it’s okay for the pollies, lawyers and reporters to be entertained, why can’t we be treated similarly (albeit on probably a lot smaller budget than the boys in Canberra)?

Come on boys, one of you in the AMA, RACGP or any of the other useless, toothless representative bodies needs to stand up and be counted. Enough is enough. I’m sick to death of the fact we have to apologise for the hospitality we receive, paltry as it is, but the other ‘professions’ don’t.

It’s time to earn your money and stand up for all us doctors who are working hard under an ever-failing system. A $1 meal will not buy my soul (though a round-the-world trip to “study cultural facets” of various countries stopping at Venice, Paris, Rome, London and New York may do the deed).

Dr David Hart
Burleigh Heads, Qld

 

  Healthy Skepticism on RSS   Healthy Skepticism on Facebook   Healthy Skepticism on Twitter

Please
Click to Register

(read more)

then
Click to Log in
for free access to more features of this website.

Forgot your username or password?

You are invited to
apply for membership
of Healthy Skepticism,
if you support our aims.

Pay a subscription

Support our work with a donation

Buy Healthy Skepticism T Shirts


If there is something you don't like, please tell us. If you like our work, please tell others.

Email a Friend








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