Healthy Skepticism Library item: 4589

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

Gillies J, Brown J, Byrnes C, Farrell A, Graham D.
PHARMAC and Ventolin in New Zealand.
N Z Med J 2005 Aug 12; 118:(1220):U1616

Abstract:

Recently, PHARMAC undertook an unfortunate experiment on asthma sufferers when it fundamentally changed its funding support for reliever medications. Ventolin metered dose inhaler (MDI), the backbone of asthma relief for over 30 years, was dropped in favour of Salamol, a post-patent salbutamol in a device which, within the first few weeks of use, has been found to be ineffective by many patients, and thus potentially dangerous. PHARMAC has agreed to reconsider its decision, but how was this decision reached in the first place?

Keywords:
Adult Albuterol/administration & dosage* Asthma/drug therapy* Bronchodilator Agents/administration & dosage* Child Drug Industry/methods* Equipment Design Equipment Failure Humans Metered Dose Inhalers New Zealand Treatment Outcome

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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