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: 2494

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

Bode UH, Geisler EP.
[Medical ethics as output of economically motivated industrial objectives].
Wien Med Wochenschr. 2002; 152:(13-14):309-12
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=Retrieve&db=pubmed&dopt=Abstract&list_uids=12168510


Abstract:

Ethics and economics are not mutually exclusive, but rather related concepts that help the human race in dealing with scarce resources. Safeguarding the resources employed and making a profit are general industrial objectives. Product-specific objectives, such as optimising medicinal safety and creating benefits for the individual and society, are discussed. Healing disease, improving quality of life and prolonging length of life are very important considerations. The contributions of the pharmaceutical industry in fulfilling ethically based demands will be primarily treated as the careful use of resources (e.g. by renunciation of state support). Other ethical contributions are the early communication of research results for intersectoral use and a voluntary code of conduct to regulate the actions of pharmaceutical companies with regard to information and advertising. In the Third World pharmaceutical industry is mainly faced to potential waste of valuable medicines, due to insufficient infrastructure of logistics and distribution capacities in one region, given a shortage of these very medicines in other and better structured regions. The value of medicines is defined by a comparison of competing therapies (difference in consumption of resources). Possible ethical deficiencies arising from a lack of direct contact of the patient with industry and the quasi-penalisation of patients because of faulty lifestyle are briefly discussed.

Keywords:
Cost-Benefit Analysis/trends Developing Countries Drug Costs/trends Drug Industry/economics English Abstract Ethics, Medical* Ethics, Pharmacy Forecasting Health Resources/economics* Health Services Accessibility/economics Humans Organizational Objectives/economics* Quality of Life *analysis Austria developing countries bioethics economics opportunity cost profit safety cost-benefit analysis PROMOTIONAL STRATEGIES: INDUSTRY REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION

 

  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