Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3287

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

Mintz M.
At any cost: corporate greed, women, and the Dalkon Shield
1985;

Abstract:

One of the part owners of the Dalkon Corporation wrote an influential article about the Dalkon Shield in a major medical journal without revealing his conflict of interest. A. H. Robins, the company that bought the Dalkon Shield, ordered 199000 reprints of the article to distribute to doctors. Journal ads run by Robins selectively cited literature about the product to make it seem safer and more effective than it really was. To get to women, Robins planted Shield propaganda in the guise of news in United States and foreign newspapers, magazines and on television and radio shows.

Keywords:
*analysis/United States/Dalkon Shield/A. H. Robins/conflict of interest/journal advertisements/references/quality of information/ acknowledgement of funding/ company supplied articles/ industry generated publicity/ETHICAL ISSUES IN PROMOTION: LINKS BETWEEN HEALTH PROFESSIONALS AND INDUSTRY/EVALUATION OF PROMOTION: JOURNAL ADVERTISEMENTS/PROMOTION DISGUISED: APPOINTMENTS AND RETAINERS/PROMOTION DISGUISED: CLINICAL TRIALS/PROMOTION DISGUISED: JOURNAL REPRINTS/PROMOTION DISGUISED: PRESS CONFERENCES AND PRESS COVERAGE/PROMOTIONAL TECHNIQUES: ENDORSEMENTS/VOLUME OF AND EXPENDITURE ON PROMOTION

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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