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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 16627

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: Broadcast

Webb J
US Health Reform: Beware of Side Effects!
BBC Radio 4 2009 Oct 11
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00n8ss0


Full text:

America is the world leader in medical innovation, and many advances in medicine have been instrumental in helping Americans and people all over the world to live longer and healthier lives. So should we be worried in the UK that healthcare reform in America may impact on the sorts of drugs and technologies that NHS patients have access to?

In 2008, the US pharmaceutical industry spent 65 billion dollars on research and development, and they have made it clear that ‘reform must protect the US’s lead in medical innovation’.

Justin Webb investigates whether all that money, prohibitively expensive drugs and cutting-edge technology translates to better healthcare and asks if cuts can been made without stifling innovation.

He talks to those who are involved in making the decisions and those who will be affected by them when the health reform bill is delivered to the president, and speaks to leading figures in the NHS to ask if American fears are well founded.

 

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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