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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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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963