Healthy Skepticism Library item: 6786

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

Fried S.
Bitter pills: inside the hazardous world of legal drugs
New York: Bantam Books 1998

Abstract:

(Limited to parts of article dealing with promotion.) Sales representatives were presenting false information about the author’s wife and her serious reaction to an antibiotic when they were visiting health professionals. In the Netherlands, one doctor discussed how a sales representative had owned up to the fact that there were doctors who “get a blank check from the company . . . if they prescribe for their whole practice. Companies always deny they do this sort of thing, but they don’t deny that they put high targets on sales levels.â€ Another sales representative, in the United States, revealed some of the ways that detailers get around Food and Drug Administration rules about sales materials.

Keywords:
*analysis/United States/Netherlands/sales representatives/doctors/ATTITUDES REGARDING PROMOTION: SALES REPRESENTATIVES/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: PAYMENT FOR MEALS, ACCOMODATION, TRAVEL, ENTERTAINMENT/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: DETAILING/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