Healthy Skepticism Library item: 7994

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

Godlee F.
Reputations for sale?
BMJ 2007;334 (27 January), 2007 Jan 27; 334:(7586):0
http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/334/7586/0

Abstract:

This week, BBC’s Panorama programme again revisits the controversy surrounding the SSRI Seroxat. Its 2002 investigation into reports of adverse events from Seroxat prompted 67 000 people to contact the BBC, forcing a rethink of the safety data. Now GlaxoSmithKline faces legal action and, if found culpable, the possibility of huge payouts to thousands of patients.

As Joe Collier explains in his preview of this week’s Panorama, to be aired on Monday 29 January (doi: 10.1136/bmj.39104.771597.59), the focus this time is on the interplay between industry and the forces that should counter what he calls “the adverse effects of drug companies.” Panorama’s account of GlaxoSmithKline’s successful attempts to market Seroxat for use in children, despite the fact that its own published trial found evidence of serious adverse effects and failed to show benefit, is fascinating but depressingly familiar. The Vioxx story, told last week (BMJ 20 . . .

Notes:

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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