Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4061

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

Gordon M.
Disinformation from pharmaceutical company representatives.
CMAJ 1990 Jun 1; 142:(11):1177-8

Abstract:

The author witnessed a sales representative making a presentation that included a comparison of the cost of her company’s drug with the cost of comparable drugs. However, she neglected to mention that the top rated drug was also available generically at a much cheaper cost. When this was pointed out to her she maintained that her goal was to present the relative cost of trade-name products.

Keywords:
*letter to the editor/Canada/sales representatives/quality of information/consumer drug prices/ Code of Marketing Practices (Can)/disinformation/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: SALES REPRESENTATIVES/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/PROMOTION DISGUISED: DISINFORMATION AND HARASSMENT/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION Communication* Costs and Cost Analysis Drug Industry* Drug Therapy*/economics Humans Therapeutic Equivalency

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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