Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6643

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: book

Pearce N.
Adverse reactions, social responses: a tale of two asthma mortality epidemics
New York: Oxford University Press 1996

Abstract:

Beginning in the late 1970s and extending through most of the 1980s New Zealand experienced an epidemic of asthma deaths that was coincident in time to the marketing of a particular drug, fenoterol by Boehringer Ingelheim. Research in New Zealand established a link between fenoterol and the asthma deaths. The company resorted to a variety of tactics to try and stop publication of the article and to try and mitigate the consequences after publication. The company hired consultants to review and criticize the research, it impugned the integrity of the researchers and it lobbied the New Zealand department of health.

Keywords:
*analysis/New Zealand/asthma/Boehringer Ingelheim/reaction to critics/ disinformation/ fenoterol/PROMOTION DISGUISED: DISINFORMATION AND HARASSMENT

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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