Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4208

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

Margolis LH.
The ethics of accepting gifts from pharmaceutical companies.
Pediatrics 1991 Dec; 88:(6):1233-7

Abstract:

How physicians respond to the promotional activities of the pharmaceutical industry is the subject of ongoing debate and controversy. This paper postulates that the acceptance of gifts in virtually any form violates fundamental duties of the physician of nonmaleficence, fidelity, justice and self-improvement. The medical community must articulate this position clearly, and it should act accordingly.

Keywords:
*analysis/promotion costs and volume/bioethics/gift giving/relationship between medical profession and industry/agency role/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: GIFT GIVING/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: DOCTOR-PATIENT RELATIONSHIP/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PROFESSIONALISM/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: HEALTH PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Beneficence Disclosure Drug Industry* Ethical Theory Ethics, Medical* Gift Giving* Humans Marketing of Health Services Research Subjects Therapeutic Human Experimentation

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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