Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4385

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

Mossinghoff GJ.
Pharmaceutical manufacturers and self-regulation of drug advertising and promotion
Journal of Drug Issues 1992; 22:235-243

Abstract:

Contrary to critics’ contentions that pharmaceutical promotion and advertising hurts medical care and raises health care costs, the opposite is true. Advertising and promotion improves health care quality by keeping health care providers up to date about the best medicines for preventing, treating and curing diseases. This knowledge reduces the need for more expensive medical care and helps restore good health, which lowers overall health care costs. The article cites a number of instances in which advertising and promotional efforts by pharmaceutical companies have increased awareness of health problems amenable to pharmaceutical intervention, with positive results. Pharmaceutical company support of medical journals and continuing medical education has been an important resource for the dissemination of new medical knowledge. Government regulation of pharmaceutical advertising and promotion is strict. The research-based pharmaceutical industry has adopted guidelines that prohibit many of the activities critics have referred to as abuses. Further government regulation would be unnecessary and unwise.

Keywords:
*analysis/United States/industry perspective/regulation of promotion/value of promotion/quality of prescribing/healthcare costs/sales representatives/journal advertisements/continuing medical education/sponsored symposia & conferences/Food and Drug Administration/FDA/Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association (US)/ research-based manufacturers/health and healthcare/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: INDUSTRY/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: GENERAL QUALITY OF INFORMATION/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE/PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: DOCTORS/PROMOTION DISGUISED: SUPPORT FOR CME/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: COMPLIANCE, SANCTIONS, STANDARDS/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: INDUSTRY SELF-REGULATION

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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