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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 14642

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

Wadman M.
Pharma payment probe widens its net.
Nature 2008 Oct 23; 455:(7216):1017
http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081022/full/4551017a.html


Abstract:

US senator Charles Grassley (Republican, Iowa) is no Sigmund Freud, but since early this year he has succeeded in putting the psychiatric establishment on the couch. Grassley, the senior Republican on the Senate finance committee, has detailed how eight prominent academic researchers (see ‘Show me the money’) failed to obey rules and report to their universities payments from drug companies, some running into seven figures.

Keywords:
Child Conflict of Interest* Drug Industry/economics* Drug Industry/ethics Humans Professional Misconduct* Psychiatry/economics Psychiatry/ethics* Psychiatry/trends Societies, Medical/economics Societies, Medical/ethics

 

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Cases of wilful misrepresentation are a rarity in medical advertising. For every advertisement in which nonexistent doctors are called on to testify or deliberately irrelevant references are bunched up in [fine print], you will find a hundred or more whose greatest offenses are unquestioning enthusiasm and the skill to communicate it.

The best defence the physician can muster against this kind of advertising is a healthy skepticism and a willingness, not always apparent in the past, to do his homework. He must cultivate a flair for spotting the logical loophole, the invalid clinical trial, the unreliable or meaningless testimonial, the unneeded improvement and the unlikely claim. Above all, he must develop greater resistance to the lure of the fashionable and the new.
- Pierre R. Garai (advertising executive) 1963