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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20132

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

Rankin P
Offensive to GPs
Australian Doctor 1999 Mar 1926


Full text:

Editor – The marketing gurus have struck again. I refer to the mass media campaign “acne can be cured” which contains the message “ask your doctor about seeing a skin specialist”.

I agree with the general thrust of the campaign that attempts to dispel the myths surrounding acne.

However, this ad campaign itself perpetuates the myth that GPs are little more than useless appendages attached to referral pads.

Every GP whom I have asked is deeply offended by the suggestion they are incapable of treating the 80% of the population that at some stage of their life will get acne.

Only a minority needs Roaccutane, and I am sure that our overworked dermatological colleagues do not want to be inundated by mildly spotty teenagers.

I plan to boycott Roche products until they modify or withdraw this kind of advertising.

 

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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