Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3416

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

Bower AD, Burkett GL.
Family physicians and generic drugs: a study of recognition, information sources, prescribing attitudes, and practices.
J Fam Pract 1987 Jun; 24:(6):612-6

Abstract:

A survey of a national sample of family physicians was undertaken to investigate several aspects of attitudes and prescribing patterns related to generic drugs. Questionnaires were returned by 317 of 501 eligible respondents for a response rate of 63.3 percent. Of the respondents, 62.5 percent said they had enough confidence in generic drugs to prescribe them in their practices, but only 26.9 percent said they actually prescribed mostly generics. Respondents were also asked to indicate the relative importance of several potential sources of information on new drugs and to test their ability to recognize a list of generic and trade name drugs. Several associations were identified between physicians’ sources of drug information and generic drug recognition, attitudes, and prescription patterns. The habit of prescribing mostly generic drugs, for example, was found to be more common among family physicians who were residency trained, who relied least on drug company representatives, and who were regular readers of the New England Journal of Medicine. The ability to recognize all ten generic names was found to be highest among these same groups of physicians and also among those who relied least on journal advertisements and those who were regular readers of The Medical Letter.

Keywords:
*analytic survey/United States/primary care doctors/source of information/generics/journal advertisements/drug names/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: DOCTORS Attitude of Health Personnel Drug Information Services Drug Utilization* Family Practice* Prescriptions, Drug* Questionnaires Therapeutic Equivalency United States

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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