Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3614

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

Tan M.
Dying for drugs: pill power and politics in the Philippines
1988;

Abstract:

The chapter discusses the role of sales representatives in promoting drugs and other forms of promotion including bribing doctors with lavish gifts, sending them to scientific meetings in five star hotels, entertaining them with lewd shows and the use of drug company sponsored clinical trials. Direct-to-consumer promotion of over-the-counter drugs is prominent in the Philippines through both print and broadcast advertisements. Because of heavy advertising the companies are able to put pressure on the media to silence criticism of the industry. Aggressive promotional tactics modify the prescribing habits of physicians in the Philippines leading to irrational drug use and the use of useless products.. Double standards in the information that is provided to doctors in the Philippines and industrialized countries is common. Finally, the advertising has resulted in the medicalization of problems of everyday life.

Keywords:
*analysis/Philippines/developing countries/quality of information/gift giving/ direct-to-consumer advertising/ DTCA/ drug company sponsored research/ drug company sponsored meals and travel/quality of information/quality of prescribing/ medicalization of problems/ sales representatives/ sponsored symposia & conferences/ print advertisements/ broadcast advertisements/ reaction to critics/ over-the-counter medications/health and healthcare/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: GIFT GIVING/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: PAYMENT FOR MEALS, ACCOMODATION, TRAVEL, ENTERTAINMENT/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: COMPARISON BETWEEN DEVELOPING AND DEVELOPED COUNTRIES/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER ADVERTISING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: PRINT AND BROADCASE ADVERTISEMENTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: ACCESS TO ESSENTIAL DRUGS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: OUTCOME OF CLINICAL TRIALS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTION AND HEALTH NEEDS: PROMOTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES/PROMOTION DISGUISED: CONFERENCES AND MEETINGS/SPONSORSHIP: RESEARCH/VOLUME OF AND EXPENDITURE ON PROMOTION

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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