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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14080

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

Giampaolo V, Riccardo R, Roberto S.
Drugs in the newspapers.
Drugs 2008; 68:(7):1017-8
http://drugs.adisonline.com/pt/re/drugs/toc.00003495-200868070-00000.htm


Abstract:

Communication about drugs through newspapers is a critical issue with a high ethical impact in a modern society, which is characterized by a strong consumerism, including that for drugs. Newspapers and journalists have in their hands a very powerful opportunity to influence the choices people make and this becomes more critical when it refers to health problems. Within the area of health, the drug market is a huge business, and even more so in those countries, such as the US and New Zealand, where direct to consumer advertising is permitted.

As a joint collaboration of a newspaper journalist in charge of the health pages of Corriere della Sera (the most read Italian newspaper), a medical journalist expert on drugs working in collaboration with different journals, and a clinical pharmacologist from the University and Reference Centre for Education and Communication within the WHO Programme for International Drug Monitoring, we present the following points on this issue for consideration by the readers…

Keywords:
Publication Types: Letter MeSH Terms: Disclosure* Drug Industry Humans Newspapers* Pharmaceutical Preparations*/adverse effects Substances: Pharmaceutical Preparations

 

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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