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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 12901

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: news

Woodhead N.
Education: or is it marketing?
6minutes 2008 Feb 221
http://www.6minutes.com.au/dirplus/images/6minutes/newspluspharma/22_02_2008.pdf


Full text:

The BMJ this week carries a strong attack on medical education providers in Australia saying that contrary to their claims of independence they are providing doctors with ‘marketing masquerading as
education’.
In an article on ‘the invisible influence’ in doctor’s education, BMJ visiting editor Ray
Moynihan says leaked emails show that drug companies are being allowed to determine the
speakers and topics at medical education events accredited by august associations.
The material, to be presented on an ABC Background Briefing program this weekend, is said to show that three pharmaceutical companies were able to ensure their preferred speakers were chosen for
education seminars organised by a company HealthEd.
Mr Moynhihan, who is also a lecturer in the faculty of Health at the University of Newcastle,
says the material also provides proof that the sponsors were able to ensure the speakers and
topics were “on message”.
He says doctors are generally unaware of the likely bias in the content of what they perceive
to be high quality educational events.
“Oversight of these educational events is currently a self-regulatory affair, and medical associations everywhere seem uninterested, at this stage, in guaranteeing genuine
independence from industry influence.,” he writes.
But the managing director of HealthEd, Dr Ramesh Manocha rejects any suggestion that educational events were not independent. He tells the BMJ that any requests about meeting content from industry sponsors are filtered through independent working groups and scientific committees.
Dr Peter Mansfield, a South Australian GP who is also head of the anti-drug promotion lobby group Healthyskepticism.
org says medical education should be funded by taxpayers rather than commercial sponsors.

 

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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