Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8454

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

Williams P.
Cost of tranquilizers
Social Science and Medicine 1982; 16:(22):1955-1958

Abstract:

The variables associated with the cost of tranquilizers in England were presented. During 1966-1971, the price of tranquilizers was relatively stable, and changes in the total cost were found to be due almost entirely to increases in prescribing. During 1972-1977, the price of tranquilizers was subject to large changes, for two reasons. First, inflation, represented here by the index of wholesale prices of pharmaceutical preparations, and secondly, a reduction in the price of diazepam and chlordiazepoxide as a result of the Monopolies Commission inquiry. These changes had a dramatic effect on the total cost of tranquilizers, to the extent that the effect of variations in prescribing becomes negligible. The findings suggest that any debate on drug cost should acknowledge the effect of pharmaceutical industry pricing policy and inflation, as well as consider the prescribing behavior of doctors.

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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