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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2479

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

Collier J, Iheanacho I.
The pharmaceutical industry as an informant.
Lancet 2002 Nov 2; 360:(9343):1405-9
http://www.thelancet.com/journal/vol/iss/full/llan.360.9343.editorial_and_review.22976.1


Abstract:

The pharmaceutical industry spends more time and resources on generation, collation, and dissemination of medical information than it does on production of medicines. This information is essential as a resource for development of medicines, but is also needed to satisfy licensing requirements, protect patents, promote sales, and advise patients, prescribers, and dispensers. Such information is of great commercial value, and most of it is confidential, protected by regulations about intellectual property rights. Through their generation and dissemination of information, transnational companies can greatly influence clinical practice. Sometimes, their commercially determined goals represent genuine advances in health-care provision, but most often they are implicated in excessive and costly production of information that is largely kept secret, often duplicated, and can risk undermining the best interests of patients and society.

Keywords:
Drug Industry/organization & administration* Drug Information Services/organization & administration* Health Promotion Humans Male Research* *analysis United Kingdom INFORMATION FROM INDUSTRY: DOCTORS INFORMATION FROM INDUSTRY: PATIENTS AND CONSUMERS INFORMATION FROM INDUSTRY: PHARMACISTS INFORMATION FROM INDUSTRY: REGULATORY AUTHORITIES

 

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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