Healthy Skepticism Library item: 20278

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

Noble RC
Gifts to Physicians From Industry
JAMA 1991 Jan 23; 266:(16):
http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=392817

Abstract:

The American Medical Association Council on Ethical and Judicial Affairs1 stated that gifts to physicians from industry are permissible if they benefit patients and are not of substantial value. The council’s advice misses the mark.We should not take gifts from industry when we are not the direct consumers of their products. Is there a difference between a physician accepting a road atlas from a life insurance salesperson and a physician accepting the same atlas from a pharmaceutical representative? Yes, there is. In the first case, the physician is the potential customer of the life insurance company, and the physician is free to choose whether to purchase the insurance. In the second case, the physician is the person who chooses a certain type of medication for the patient, who is the customer. The patient is not free to choose. By accepting the road atlas from the

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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