Healthy Skepticism Library item: 28

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

Lenzer J.
Alteplase for stroke: money and optimistic claims buttress the “brain attack“ campaign.
BMJ 2002 Mar 23; 324:723-726
http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/324/7339/723

Abstract:

The American Heart Association rated the thrombolytic agent alteplase (tPA) as a class I (definitely recommended) intervention for stroke despite controversy about its safety and efficacy.
Most of the association’s stroke experts have ties to the manufacturers of alteplase. Genentech, the US manufacturer of alteplase, contributed over $11m to the American Heart Association in the decade before its recommendation on alteplase. Following public scrutiny, the American Heart
Association recently withdrew statements that alteplase for stroke “saves livesâ€. Seemingly impartial organisations that issue professional guidelines may have ties to the manufacturers of recommended interventions.

Keywords:
*analysis United States American Heart Association Genentech conflict of interest relationship between researchers, academic institutions and industry stroke thrombolysis ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: LINKS BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AND INDUSTRY SPONSORSHIP: HEALTH PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS

Notes:

Commentaries from: Charles Warlow, BMJ 2002:324:726-727; Jeffrey Saver et al., BMJ 2002;324:727-729.
ProCite field⁵: Analysis
ProCite field³⁸: bmj.com/cgi/reprint/324/7339/723

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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