Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4063

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

Greenberg DS.
All expenses paid, Doctor.
Lancet 1990 Dec 22-29; 336:(8730):1568-9

Abstract:

Congressional hearings in Washington were told about excesses in drug promotion by a variety of witnesses. Tactics used by the pharmaceutical industry included: gifts, paying for attendance at holiday resorts, ghost writing articles, paying for attendance at operas and then offering credits for medical education for those who attended, paying doctors who entered patients in bogus trials, paying for computer systems for doctors and offering to put pharmacists on “advisory boardsâ€ because of their purchasing authority. Shortly before the hearings started the American Medical Association adopted a code entitled Guidelines for Gifts from Industry to Physicians and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association copied the AMA and issued its own Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices. The principles of these codes are sound but the rules, unaccompanied by disclosure requirements or penalties are merely advisory and their effectiveness is open to doubt.

Keywords:
*news story/United States/gift giving/drug company sponsored research/continuing medical education/ghost writing/relationship between medical profession and industry/regulation of promotion/American Medical Association/AMA/Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (US)/Guidelines for Gifts from Industry to Physicians (AMA)/Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices (US)/PROMOTION DISGUISED: APPOINTMENTS AND RETAINERS Advertising American Medical Association Codes of Ethics Conflict of Interest* Drug Industry* Economics* Ethics, Medical Ethics, Professional Federal Government Fees and Charges Government Government Regulation Humans Motivation* Patient Care Pharmaceutical Preparations* Physicians* Professional Misconduct* Reference Standards Social Control, Formal* Social Control, Informal* Societies United States

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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