Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3549

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

Hemminki E.
Commercial information on drugs: confusing the physician?
Journal of Drug Issues 1988; 18:245-257

Abstract:

Physicians’ drug prescribing habits are not adequate. This paper gives examples from Finland suggesting that information given by drug industry is likely to create and reinforce poor prescribing. Results from four different studies looking at the content of the Finnish commercial drug catalogues suggest that physicians relying on them may be led astray. Studies on drug representatives’ presentations in 1975 and 1986 showed that negative aspects of drugs were often omitted. The confusion created by the double name system (trade names and generic names) is illustrated by a survey, showing that physicians did not often know the generic equivalents of the trade names and vice versa. At the end, predictions of possible changes in commercial drug information are presented.

Keywords:
*content analysis/Finland/commercial compendia/sales representatives/quality of information/doctors/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: COMMERCIAL DRUG COMPENDIA/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: DRUG NAME

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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