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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3413

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

Pharmaceutical funds for clinical research: a mixed blessing.
Lancet. 1987 Jan 31; 1:(8527):257-8


Abstract:

The present shift of emphasis from public to commercial funding has been extolled as bringing virtues of practical relevance, but it does not necessarily follow that industrial interest linked to profit creation will lead to balanced development. The growing dependence of clinical research on commercial funding often leaads to work of little more than marginal interest. The major drive will be towards the commercial project, and the emphasis on market-oriented research may be increased by the attitudes of universities themselves.

Keywords:
*editorial/United Kingdom/drug company sponsored research/SPONSORSHIP: RESEARCH Drug Industry/economics* Great Britain Research Support*

 

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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