Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4353

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: news

Harvey K.
Pharmaceutical marketing
1992 Feb 21-23

Abstract:

While 15-20 of sales are spent on drug promotion by the pharmaceutical industry, only small amounts of money are spent on educating consumers about drugs. Pharmaceutical marketing depends more on skills of manipulation than on objective and balanced data. Doctors are frequently offered gifts and have conferences subsidized for them. There is also a double standard in promotion between industrialized and developing countries. If left unchecked pharmaceutical marketing can have serious consequences: older less expensive drugs are left unused in preference to newer, more expensive, more heavily promoted ones; there is irrational drug use leading to treatment failures. In response to criticism the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations implemented a code of marketing but the code has had little impact. Since 1988 the World Health Organization has had its Ethical Criteria for Medicinal Drug Promotion.

Keywords:
*analysis/developing countries/IFPMA/WHO/World Health Organization/International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations/regulation of promotion/gift giving/ sponsored symposia & conferences/ quality of prescribing/ prescribing costs/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: GIFT GIVING/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: PAYMENT FOR MEALS, ACCOMODATION, TRAVEL, ENTERTAINMENT/PROMOTION AND HEALTH NEEDS: PROMOTION IN DEVELOPING COUNTRIES/PROMOTION DISGUISED: CONFERENCES AND MEETINGS/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INTERNATIONAL CODES

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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