Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4486

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

Schofield I.
Prescrire—challenging marketing and promotional practices in France
Scrip Magazine 1992 Apr; (3):8-9
www.pjbpubs.co.uk/scrip/scrhome.html www.pjbpubs.co.uk/scrip/scrhome.html

Abstract:

Last year the French drug bulletin la revue Prescrire ran an editorial urging doctors not to see sales representatives for a year. Both companies and the detailers reacted negatively to the editorial although the editor said he was not recommending a boycott but asking doctors to weigh up the value of company drug information. Promotional pressure in France is stronger than in other European countries and a general practitioner can expect an average of 15-20 visits per week. According to Prescrire, negative data about drugs will be withheld. Another tactic used by detailers is to emphasize the mechanism of action for a new drug.

Keywords:
*analysis/France/sales representatives/quality of information/doctors/la revue Prescrire/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: MEDICAL JOURNALS/EDUCATING ABOUT PROMOTION: HEALTH PROFESSIONALS/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING

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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