Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3004

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

Relman AS.
Who reviews the ads?
N Engl J Med 1979 Nov 1; 301:(18):999

Abstract:

Journals should not and cannot critically review the therapeutic claims and prescribing information in each of the ads that they run. Such a policy would mean that the journals were competing with the Food and Drug Administration which ahs the statutory authority to regulate the advertising of prescription drugs. The New England Journal of Medicine assumes that advertising copy is in compliance with the law and that if it is not the FDA will identify it and deal with it appropriately. Doctors can help this process by complaining to the FDA.

Keywords:
*editorial/United States/journal advertisements/regulation of promotion/attitude toward promotion/Food and Drug Administration/FDA/New England Journal of Medicine/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: MEDICAL JOURNALS/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION Advertising* Drug Industry New England Periodicals* Pharmaceutical Preparations* United States United States Food and Drug Administration

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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