Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4505

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

Chetley A.
Promoting health or pushing drugs?
HAI News 1992 Oct; (67):1-2, 10-12

Abstract:

Most drug promotion is directed at healthcare workers but increasingly companies are targeting the general public to apply indirect pressure on healthcare workers to prescribe. Taken in total, drug promotion is a comprehensive attempt to influence health professionals and the general public to suspend their critical judgement about which medicines to use. This article briefly discusses the following topics: misleading promotion; industry self-regulatory codes; advertising; sales representatives; bribes and gifts; consequences of uncontrolled drug promotion; implementing the World Health Organization’s Ethical Criteria for Medicinal Drug Promotion; strengthening national regulations on promotion; how professional associations can help to control promotion; and ending secrecy around information.

Keywords:
*analysis/doctors/general public and consumers/DTCA/direct-to-consumer advertising/regulation of promotion/quality of information/gift giving/bribery/journal advertisements/sales representatives/WHO/World Health Organization/Ethical Criteria for Medicinal Drug Promotion/health and healthcare/ healthcare costs/promotion costs and volume/source of information/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: GIFT GIVING/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: LINKS BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AND INDUSTRY/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: PAYMENT FOR MEALS, ACCOMODATION, TRAVEL, ENTERTAINMENT/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: GENERAL QUALITY OF INFORMATION/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: CONSUMER DRUG COSTS/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: HEALTH AND HEALTH CARE/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTION AS A SOURCE OF INFORMATION: DOCTORS/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER ADVERTISING/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: DIRECT GOVERNMENT REGULATION/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: HEALTH PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS/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