Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3975

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

Relman AS.
Economic incentives in clinical investigation.
N Engl J Med 1989 Apr 6; 320:(14):933-4

Abstract:

Medical research is becoming commercialized and clinical investigators now find themselves in situations involving conflicts of interest. In particular, researchers are acquiring financial interests in the new drugs or clinical devices they are studying. Economic incentives can introduce subtle biases into the conduct, analysis or reporting of research results that may escape even careful peer review. The author reviews the two commonest justifications for economic incentivese for clinical investigators. All institutions sponsoring clinical research or employing clinical investigators should develop policies to deal with possible conflicts of interest.

Keywords:
*editorial/conflict of interest/drug company sponsored research/academic freedom/relationship between researchers, academic institutions and industry/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: ACADEMIC INSTITUTIONS/SPONSORSHIP: RESEARCH Clinical Trials/economics* Commerce Motivation

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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