Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3949

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

Helwig D.
There's no room for freebies in medical journalism.
CMAJ 1989 Mar 1; 140:(5):542-3

Abstract:

Medical writers and reporters regularly receive invitations for free travel. If these favours are offered without obligation is it really wrong for a publication to accept them? From a journalistic point of view, the danger is that the products of junket-offering companies will attract more coverage than equally effective or even superior products made by competitors that do not provide junkets. Medical periodicals should draft and publish written codes of ethics applicable to both staff and freelance writers.

Keywords:
*analysis/Canada/conflict of interest/journalists/gift giving/industry generated publicity/PROMOTION DISGUISED: PRESS CONFERENCES AND PRESS COVERAGE/SPONSORSHIP: JOURNALISTS Canada Drug Industry* Ethics* Public Relations Writing*

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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