Healthy Skepticism Library item: 228

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

de Barros JAC.
One more case of the double standard: discrepancies between drug information provided to Brazilian and American physicians
Pharmacoepidemiology and Drug Safety 2000; 9:281-287
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract/73501719/ABSTRACT

Abstract:

Several factors have been identified as exerting influences upon the physician prescribing behaviour. Some studies on this issue emphasize the role played by the sources of information available to physicians. A number of reports have been published on the influence of marketing strategies upon these professionals. Such strategies include advertisements in medical journals, detail-men, free samples, distribution of folders, leaflets and gifts, as well as support to congresses and symposia. The impact of the special relationships that manufacturers cultivate with health authorities and physicians and considered opinion-makers should also not be underestimated. This study aimed to evaluate the quality of information provided by a widely-used Brazilian prescribing guide, the Dicionário de Especialidades Farmacêuticas(DEF) on the 44 best-selling pharmaceutical products in Brazil. WHO criteria for drug information were used as parameters of which information is of such outstanding importance that it should be included in any informative material offered to physicians. The information in the DEF was compared with that available for the same products in the PDR (Physicians’ Desk Reference) and USP-DI (Drug Information for the Health Care Professional) used by prescribers in USA. Results show the absence of important data from the Brazilian manual, including contraindications, adverse effects and drug interactions. These findings suggest that poor quality information may potentially contribute to the irrational use of drugs.

Keywords:
drug information; drugs prescribing; pharmaceutical marketing strategies

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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