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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4218

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

Rapp MS, Woollard R.
Two cheers for the CMA's new guidelines on drug company-MD relations The CMA's MD-drug industry guidelines offer advice, nothing more.
CMAJ 1991 Dec 1; 145:(11):1497-9


Abstract:

There is little evidence that the new guidelines from the Canadian Medical Association on the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession are needed. There has not been a great deal of unethical behaviour. The documents expects too much from doctors; if they have a dinner paid for by a drug company it is unethical but if the purchasing agent for a company has a dinner at the expense of a wholesaler that would be considered part of doing business. If followed rigidly, the new guidelines will reduce the amount of continuing medical education available in some areas. The idea that these guidelines will result in lower drug prices is false. With the advent of rules like these we have moved from “doctor bashing” to “doctor shaping.” These new ethical guidelines are overdrawn and excessive and will not have the effects their authors intended. They should be withdrawn.

Keywords:
*analysis/Canada/ conflict of interest/ Canadian Medical Association/ continuing medical education/ relationship between medical profession and industry/ consumer drug prices/guidelines, discussion of/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: LINKS BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AND INDUSTRY/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: HEALTH PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Advertising Canada Conflict of Interest* Drug Industry* Economics* Education, Medical Ethics, Medical Financial Support Guidelines* Humans Organizational Policy* Pharmaceutical Preparations Physicians* Societies

 

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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