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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2928

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

Hemminki E, Pesonen T.
An inquiry into associations between leading physicians and the drug industry in Finland.
Soc Sci Med 1977 May; 11:(8-9):501-6


Abstract:

The purpose of the present study was to investigate an indirect marketing method of drug industry; the associations between the leading physicians and the drug industry. 337 Finnish physicians were defined as key-physicians on the basis of their formal positions in 1974. their associations with the drug industry in 1974 were investigated. 41% of the key-physicians had some associations with the drug industry. Those physicians who held many positions as key-physicians had more relationships than those having fewer positions. The medical teachers had the highest frequency of relationships. But also those in the National Board of Health who had control functions over the drug industry or distributed drug information had relationships. The most common form of connection was a membership in the administrative or scientific board of a drug company. The frequent connections between the medical elite and the drug industry may have important influences on the medical practice and health policy.

Keywords:
Drug Industry* Finland Humans Physicians* *analytic survey/Finland/relationship between medical profession and industry/conflict of interest/health and healthcare/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: LINKS BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AND INDUSTRY/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE/PROMOTION DISGUISED: APPOINTMENTS AND RETAINERS

 

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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