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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 15870

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

Pharma targeted by students
Pharmacy Daily (Australia) - registration required 2009 Jun 22
http://www.pharmacydaily.com.au


Full text:

A NEW campaign run by medical students across Australia has been launched, aiming to “raise awareness of the effect that pharmaceutical marketing strategies have on prescribing habits.”

Dubbed ‘PharmaPhacts’, the initiative will be officially announced at the Australian Medical Students Association 2009 Global Health Conference to be held in Brisbane next month.

PharmaPhacts is a branch of lobby group Healthy Skepticism and claims to have advocates at each of the 19 medical schools across the country.

The campaign will comprise a website containing a review of the medical literature and other
information, as well as a petition for students to sign up to “pledging not to accept gifts, promotional material and funding from pharmaceutical companies now and into the future.”

PharmaPhacts spokesman, James Ricciardone, said the group’s current main aims are “to raise awareness and fill the gap of knowledge about the effects of pharmaceutical marketing”.

He’s soliciting donations from “like-minded individuals” to help fund the resources and other
materials for the campaign – info pharmaphacts@healthyskepticism.org.

 

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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