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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16459

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

Gérvas J, Mansfield PR
Physicians, the industry and population health
Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health 2009; 63:(10):773-774
http://jech.bmj.com/cgi/content/extract/63/10/773


Abstract:

In the 1840s, many doctors carried out autopsies of women who had died of childbirth fever. The doctors sometimes became infected with bacteria without knowing it. When they delivered more babies, they transmitted the infection to more women, causing more to die. When it was suggested to the doctors that they might be unintentionally carrying harmful bacteria they felt insulted and reacted with angry denials. Fortunately, since then our profession has gone through a paradigm shift based on understanding the germ theory of disease. Initially, it was thought that doctors who deliver babies should never carry out autopsies, but methods of preventing and/or curing bacterial infection such as surgical gloves and hand washing have been shown to be effective.

We now face a similar situation. In 2008, many doctors allowed themselves to be exposed to drug promotion. These doctors may have become infected with bias without knowing it. When they . . .

 

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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