Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4372

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

Macgregor AJ.
Physicians and pharmaceutical companies.
CMAJ 1992 Feb 1; 146:(3):327

Abstract:

The ability of physicians to deny that they can be influenced by all of the activities of the pharmaceutical industry has long fascinated the author. The strategies designed to seduce physicians operate at several levels: to get the company’s name to evoke a warm good feeling in doctors and to lead the physician into a belief that pharmacotherapy is logically the first approach to a problem. It is the cumulative package of promotional events that counts not just one single event. Doctors’ responsibility to their patients requires that they be more aware of the process.

Keywords:
*letter to the editor/Canada/agency role/ relationship between medical profession and industry/ influence techniques/guidelines, discussion of/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: LINKS BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AND INDUSTRY/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: PAYMENT FOR MEALS, ACCOMODATION, TRAVEL, ENTERTAINMENT/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: ATTITUDES TOWARDS INDUSTRY/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PROFESSIONALISM Drug Industry* Ethics, Medical* Humans Physicians*

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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