Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2827

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

Greenberg D.
Cleaning up the drug trade
New Scientist 1974 May 23; 62:491

Abstract:

At hearings of the United States Senate health subcommittee of the Labor and Public Welfare Committee, former sales representatives testified that the firms they had worked for tutored them in employing an assortment of gifts and fast-talk gimmicks to make their way past nurses and receptionists. Once with the physician they did not bother to point out the possible hazards of their company’s products. In 1973, companies sent some 2000 million free samples through the mail to doctors. Senator Edward Kennedy is introducing legislation that would ban unsolicited free samples and require detailers to complete government-certified training courses and when recommending a drug to a physician would be required to give him or her written information about undesirable side effects.

Keywords:
*news story/United States/sales representatives/drug samples/ quality of information/ regulation of promotion/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: SAMPLES/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION

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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