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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 5267

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

Fugh-Berman A, Alladin K, Chow J.
Advertising in Medical Journals: Should Current Practices Change?
PLoS Med 2006 Jun 27; 3:(6):e130
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.0030130


Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

“As a crucial part of their business model, many medical journals rely on revenue from prescription drug advertisements. “

“Dependence on a single industry can be financially disastrous for a journal that displeases its corporate funders.”

“By exclusively featuring advertisements for drugs and devices, medical journals implicitly endorse corporate promotion of the most profitable products.”

Medical journals should provide an educational function, but they are full of eye-catching ads which provide a counter-educational function.

Furthermore, because medical journals are dependant on drug advertising for their survival, they are under pressure to provide articles which play a supportive role in relation to the advertisements.

Hence the articles chosen for publication by the journal will be slanted towards to provision of information which backs the use of advertised drugs.

Articles critical of drug usage will be less likely to be published.

This tendency has important negative ramifications for the practice of medicine: ramifications which which we can observe in the form of the widespread inappropriate prescribing of whole classes of drugs.

 

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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