Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6523

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

Merck Sharp & Dohme associates Zocor with “Success•Acceptance•Confidence”
MaLAM Australian News 1994 Sep-Oct; 2:(3):1-4

Abstract:

This issue discusses the promotion of lipid lowering agents for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease. Promotion emphasizes the benefits of treatment by quoting relative risk reductions rather than absolute risk reductions. Educational meetings funded by the pharmaceutical industry only mention diet therapy but do not provide adequate information about this treatment modality.

Keywords:
*analysis/Australia/developed countries/Zocor/simvastatin/quality of information/ promotion costs and volume/ corporate funding / efficacy/ relative risk reduction/ reporting of results/conferences/MaLAM/Medical Lobby for Appropriate Marketing/Merck/ attitude toward promotion/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: INDUSTRY/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DRUG SAFETY/INFLUENCE OF PROMOTION: PRESCRIBING, DRUG USE/PROMOTION AND HEALTH NEEDS: PROMOTION IN DEVELOPED COUNTRIES/PROMOTION DISGUISED: CONFERENCES AND MEETINGS

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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