Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3059

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: news

Ross V.
Between bliss and bedlam
Maclean’s (Toronto) 1980 Dec 838-40, 42, 44

Abstract:

(Limited to parts of article dealing with promotion.) A sales representative for McNeil Laboratories described his job as “perceiving needs, or creating them.â€ Company training for detailers did not touch on mental illness or alternative therapies, although one of the drugs that McNeil promotes is an antipsychotic. According to the detailer “diagnosis is the doctor’s job. Besides, I can’t see how that would help us sell.â€ The Consumers’ Association of Canada takes the position that drug advertising shouldn’t be allowed at all.

Keywords:
*feature story/Canada/sales representatives/McNeil/Consumers’ Association of Canada/consumer groups/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: CONSUMERS/PATIENTS/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: SALES REPRESENTATIVES/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING

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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