Healthy Skepticism Library item: 3371

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

The relationship between physicians and the pharmaceutical industry: A report of the Royal College of Physicians.
J R Coll Physicians Lond 1986 Oct; 20:(4):235-42

Abstract:

We believe that a close relationship between doctors and the pharmaceutical industry is important for the treatment of patients and for the future development and assessment of new drugs. Because this relationship is so important both to medicine and to the pharmaceutical industry, we recommend that Fellows and Members of the College ensure that their behaviour in relation to the pharmaceutical industry is always seen to be scrupulously impartial and honest. The overriding principle is that any benefit in cash or kind, any gift, any hospitality or any subdiy received from a pharmaceutical company must leave the doctor’s independence of judgement manifestly unimpaired. When it comes to the margin between what is acceptable and what is unacceptable, judgement may sometimes be difficult: a useful criterion of acceptability may be â€˜would you be willing to have these arrangements generally known?’

Keywords:
*policy statement & guideline/United Kingdom/Royal College of Physicians of London/ relationship between medical profession and industry/regulation of promotion/REGULATION, CODES, GUIDELINES: HEALTH PROFESSIONAL ORGANIZATIONS Clinical Trials Drug Industry* Ethics, Medical Financing, Organized Great Britain Humans Interprofessional Relations* Legislation, Medical Physicians* Research Support

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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