Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2845

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

Kales A, Kales JD.
Shortcomings in the evaluation and promotion of hypnotic drugs
New England Journal of Medicine 1975; 293:826-827

Abstract:

One of the primary problems in the labeling and promotion of hypnotic drugs is that blanket statements are made regarding effectiveness without specifying the duration of effectiveness. Since pharmaceutical firms are allowed to make such sweeping implications based on data from only one or two nights of drug administration, the firms are not motivated to begin longer term studies. Pharmaceutical firms too often infer misleading implications or conclusions from sleep-stage data from sleep laboratory hypnotic drug trials.

Keywords:
*editorial/promotional literature/quality of information/hypnotic/ drug company sponsored research/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/PROMOTION IN SPECIFIC THERAPEUTIC AREAS: PSYCHIATRIC DISEASES/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