Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8952

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

Brennan TA, Mello MM.
Sunshine Laws and the Pharmaceutical Industry
JAMA. 2007 Mar 21; 297:(11):1255-1257.
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/full/297/11/1255

Abstract:

Recent research would suggest that the US public should be pleased with the role the pharmaceutical industry plays in advancing public health. Somewhat surprisingly, given widespread concerns about the cost-inflating effects of drugs and other medical technologies, Cutler and colleagues have shown that spending on medical technology is generally cost-effective.1-3 This is particularly true of new drugs, which often have contributed to stunning decreases in morbidity and mortality-for example, in cardiovascular disease.4-5 It appears that the huge investments needed to bring new drugs and medical devices to market are wise.

So why is there so much dissatisfaction with the pharmaceutical industry today?6 The answer appears to lie in its reliance on a distinctive model of marketing. The mainstay of the marketing effort has been a combination of advertisements to physicians, direct . . .

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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