Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2617

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

Recker RR.
Disclosure of authors' conflicts of interest - A follow-up (2nd of 4 letters)
New England Journal of Medicine 2000 Jul 13; 343:(2):146
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/343/2/146

Abstract:

The Journal ‘s policy on financial conflicts of interest seems too restrictive. The authors most qualified to write Drug Therapy articles are usually the same ones chosen to participate in the development of drugs. Thus, it would seem that the Journal ‘s policy reduces the quality of reviews by disqualifying the best authors. Why should the editors assume that persons involved in the development of drugs are automatically too biased to write Drug Therapy articles, particularly if the authors divulge their potential conflicts of interest? Readers can be trusted to decide whether there is bias. Furthermore, eliminating any author who has ties to companies that make drugs does not guarantee the elimination of bias.

Keywords:
*letter to the editor United States conflict-of-interest ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: MEDICAL JOURNAL EDITORSHIP SPONSORSHIP: RESEARCH

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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