Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2882

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

Nelson G.
Advertising and the national health
Journal of Drug Issues 1976; 6:28-33

Abstract:

As leading Congressional critic of the pharmaceutical industry, Senator Nelson finds the misuse of drugs in our society directly attributable to advertising and other forms of promotion. His criticism of detailmen, in particular, leads him to question their continuance as a method of marketing drugs. Discounting arugments that advertising is educational, he believes that drug promotion is primarily designed to sell-“to motivate the physician to prescribe and the consumer to buy.â€ The results of such activity pose a threat to the public health of the nation.

Keywords:
*analysis/United States/psychotropic drugs/sales representatives/quality of prescribing/drug misuse and abuse/medicalization of problems/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: REGULATORS AND GOVERNMENT/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: MEDICALIZATION OF PROBLEMS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTION IN SPECIFIC THERAPEUTIC AREAS: PSYCHIATRIC DISEASES

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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