Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3451

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

Lexchin J.
Pharmaceutical promotion in Canada: convince them or confuse them.
Int J Health Serv 1987; 17:(1):77-89

Abstract:

Currently, drug companies are spending in excess of $200 million annually on promoting their products to Canadian physicians. Although the industry has adopted a voluntary code of advertising practice, this has not prevented gross excesses in all forms of pharmaceutical promotion: drug-company sponsored continuing medical education, and promotion through the public media, detailers, direct mail, sampling, and journal advertising. Not only does advertising add to the cost of drugs, but physicians’ reliance on information conveyed through advertising leads to poor prescribing and consequently to significant adverse health effects for patients. Reforms of promotional practices are possible, but the initiative is unlikely to come from either the medical profession or the government.
Pressure applied through an emerging grass-roots movement is the best hope for change.

Keywords:
*analysis/Canada/promotion costs and volume/regulation of promotion/ Code of Marketing Practices (Can)/ Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association of Canada/ press conferences and releases/ sales representatives/ direct mail/ drug samples/ journal advertisements/ quality of information/ quality of prescribing/ doctors/ continuing medical education/ corporate funding/health and healthcare/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DIRECT MAIL/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: SAMPLES/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: DOCTORS/PROMOTION DISGUISED: SUPPORT FOR CME/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION/VOLUME OF AND EXPENDITURE ON PROMOTION Advertising*/methods Advertising*/standards Canada Drug Industry* Education, Medical, Continuing Humans Mass Media Periodicals

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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