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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3251

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

Joubert PH, Skene D.
Attitudes of private medical practitioners towards package inserts and other drug information sources.
S Afr Med J 1984 Aug 25; 66:(8):306-7
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6474294


Abstract:

One thousand questionnaires were distributed to private medical practitioners by representatives of a pharmaceutical company. The 221 respondents were predominantly male (91%) and most were trained at the Universities of Pretoria (37%), the Witwatersrand (22%) and Cape Town (19%) during 1960 – 1969 (24%) and 1970 – 1979 (45%). The majority (72%) found package inserts useful or extremely useful and 70% had consulted one during the previous week or on the day that they completed the questionnaire. Reasons for consulting the package insert, in order of frequency, were for information on untoward effects (64%), indications (33%) and mechanism of action (33%). Most respondents (71%) used the Monthly Index of Specialities (MIMS) more often than package inserts and 53% used the MIMS desk reference more often than package inserts. As regards additional regular information on drugs, 67% preferred a regular book to a loose-leaf system and 69% were prepared to pay for it. We are of the opinion that there is a need for information on drugs that would be complementary to current information systems, and that this should be a joint venture between Government and private enterprise, with the consumer being prepared to share the cost.

Keywords:
*cross-sectional study/South Africa/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: COMMERCIAL DRUG COMPENDIA/INFORMATION FROM INDUSTRY: DOCTORS/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: PACKAGE INSERTS Adult Attitude of Health Personnel* Drug Packaging* Female Humans Male Physicians, Family Questionnaires South Africa Statistics

 

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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