November/December 2000 Vol 18
No 11/12 ISSN
1321-571X
Changes:
Your
input is welcome as always
New Management Group
New Methods
New name: Healthy Skepticism
Our aims have not changed
We are moving from paper to the Internet
Free subscriptions
Paid subscriptions
Calendar year paid subscriptions
Subscriber participation
Your input is welcome as always
We welcome all comments,
questions and suggestions from subscribers in response to the changes described
below:
New Management Group
We have a management group
consisting of Director Peter Mansfield (GP), Treasurer Jon Jureidini (child
psychiatry), Secretary Melissa Raven (public health), Agnés Vitry (drug
information) and Katrina Allen (GP educator) who have been meeting once a month
in Adelaide since mid 2000. We include Joel Lexchin (emergency medicine) in
Toronto as a corresponding member of the management group.
If you are interested in accepting responsibilities as a member of the
management group then please let us know. The
ways in which members of the management group have been working with many others
on a variety of tasks are described below.
New Methods
MaLAM commenced in 1983 with
a specific focus on writing open letters to drug companies with subscriber
participation about harmful marketing in “developing” countries.
This was very cost effective in the 1980s but during the 1990s we became
concerned that continuing with that approach would not be cost effective for the
more subtle problems that were coming increasingly to our attention. Consequently we have been exploring new methods for achieving
the same objectives. (For more
about our objectives see below.) Most
of that exploration has been done with issues in Australia and New Zealand.
The focus on Australia and New Zealand has occurred despite our ongoing
concern with issues in all countries especially “developing” countries.
One of the reasons for the new geographical focus is that we are stronger
in Australia and have had funding from PHARMAC New Zealand.
Another reason is that the differences in drug promotion between
countries are less than they were 20 years ago. Also, we have moved towards believing that some problems need
to be solved in “developed” countries before they can be solved elsewhere.
However we expect that during the next few years we will move towards
covering a wide range of countries including many editions about problems in
“developing” countries. If any subscriber would like to see more editions of any type
that are likely to advance our aims and is willing to write them then we would
be very pleased to publish them.
Below is a list of most of our activities over the past 2 years.
They are classified according to their main focus into three areas:
advocacy, research and education. However
most activities involve more than one area or assist other work in more than one
area.
Advocacy
Joel and Peter have represented us
in Geneva at meetings of the World Health Organization – Non-Government
Organisation Roundtable.
Inspired by a call at a Roundtable meeting from Charles Medawar of Social Audit
to give direct to consumer advertising (DTCA) priority as a major emergency,
Peter, Joel, Charles, Barbara Mintzes (epidemiology), Margaret Ewen (consumer
advocacy), Anne Rochon Ford (consumer advocacy) and many others have
collaborated on writing submissions to government inquiries and visiting
politicians and key stakeholders in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and Europe.
Peter has been working on possible “win-win” responses to the systems
problems that lead drug companies to have little choice but to oversell drugs.
Consuming Interests, the policy journal of the Australian
Consumers Association, published an early draft of this work. We will publish a
more developed version later this year.
Journalists are increasingly contacting Peter.
This has led to many reports including three national television
appearances in Australia in the first half of 2001. The Australian Financial Review commissioned an
article giving the case for prohibiting research by drug companies in favour of
more research at universities.
Joel, Peter and Melissa have participated in the e-drug and nofreelunch e-mail
discussion groups.
Production of MaLAM International News has continued but is running
behind schedule. The next three
editions have been finalised and will be mailed out soon.
Research
Joel has been developing a database
of published work on pharmaceutical promotion for the WHO Essential Drugs and
other Medicines policy department (EDM).
Vasiliy Vlassov (general medicine), Joel and Peter have had a paper about drug advertising in Russia
accepted for publication in the Western Journal of Medicine.
Melissa and Peter have been working with academic psychologists to supervise
honours students’ research on the psychology of drug company influence on
prescribing.
Education.
Peter has produced Healthy
Scepticism New Zealand for PHARMAC and Melissa and Peter have written
a paper on feedback from readers. From this they compiled a poster presented for
an Australian Quality Use of Medicines symposium.
Peter has been developing teaching
materials for critical appraisal of pharmaceutical promotion for WHO EDM.
Peter has trialled drafts of this material with medical and pharmacy
students, general practitioners and senior hospital pharmacists around Australia
and New Zealand. Katrina and Peter
are developing randomised trials of such teaching of general practice trainees.
Peter and Joel have written a case study and feedback about “new drugs” for
the Australian National Prescribing Service (NPS).
The next edition is the first of three presenting the feedback for our
subscribers.
Peter and Paul Glasziou (evidence based medicine) have written a case study and
feedback about hormone replacement therapy for NPS and Peter has provided
training on this topic for NPS staff.
Jon and Peter have written articles for Health Matters (UK) and for Australasian
Psychiatry.
New name: Healthy Skepticism
We have decided to change the
name of the organisation from MaLAM to Healthy Skepticism because our methods
are changing and we need a new name that will be better for promoting our
objectives. Our reasons for
choosing the Greek spelling are a long story that we will save for later.
We plan to describe ourselves as:
Healthy Skepticism
Defending health care from misleading and harmful marketing.
Advocacy, Research and Education.
Formerly Medical Lobby for Appropriate Marketing (MaLAM)
Full implementation of this change
will take time. Meanwhile both the
old and new names may be used.
Our aims have not changed
Our aims, as expressed in our
constitution, are:
(a) to defend appropriate compassionate
scientific medical care, health professionals and the public from marketing
practices which may be detrimental to health.
(b) to engage in dialogue with bodies involved in
health-related marketing.
(c) to provide a balance of information and
practical opportunities for action, which assist health professionals to act for
the benefit of the public.
(d) to encourage bodies involved in
health-related marketing to provide reliable information to assist appropriate
therapy.
(e) to support the development of marketing
quality control systems and other methods which enable health-related marketing
to become more trustworthy and helpful.
(f) to support appropriate compassionate
scientific medical care.
(g) to provide a Medical Lobby for Appropriate
Marketing where:
Appropriate Marketing refers to
"health-related marketing with provision of appropriate information to
assist health professionals to provide appropriate compassionate scientific
medical care"
Medical Lobby refers to "an organisation
which conveys the concerns of health professionals in ways that encourage
Appropriate Marketing."
Our aims have not changed. However
we believe that it would be healthy for our organisation to discuss our aims at
least once every 10 years to decide if any updating is appropriate.
We are moving from paper to the Internet
We have also decided to move from distributing our newsletters by
post towards having them available only on our new upgraded website:
www.healthyskepticism.org.
Our previous URL: www.malam.asn.au
will continue to link to the same website as www.healthyskepticism.org indefinitely.
We will discontinue our original website:
www.camtech.net.au/malam
We will notify subscribers via e-mail when new editions are posted on the
website.
If you prefer to read MaLAM newsletters on paper then you can print them from
the website.
If you are currently a paid up
subscriber and do not have access to the Internet then we hope you will consider
gaining access. If you are not able
or do not want to do that then please fill out the enclosed form to continue to
receive MaLAM editions in the mail until your subscription runs out.
We request all subscribers in all countries to visit www.healthyskepticism.org
to register as a subscriber. If you
do not want to use our online system to register then you can use the fax
or post option on our website. You
will have the choice of being a free or paid subscriber as described below.
Since 1986 we have had a network of MaLAM distributors around the world.
We are very grateful to our distributors for reproducing MaLAM editions
and posting them to subscribers in their country for all those years.
Now distributors are no longer essential in those countries where
subscribers can easily access the Internet.
We are hoping that distributors in those countries will refocus their
support for us towards promoting our website etc.
In those countries where access to the Internet is less easy distributors
remain very important for us. Consequently
we are very pleased to announce that a new group of Sri Lankan medical students
has recently agreed to distribute our newsletters in their country.
We are happy for anyone in any country to copy and distribute any of our
work to anyone as long as we are acknowledged as the source.
However we do not give permission to be cited as the source of material
we did not produce.
Free subscriptions
We will provide free Internet subscriptions for
those who want them. We can afford
to do this because the addition of extra recipients to our free subscriber
e-mail list does not cost us any more. The
advantage of this is the possibility of reaching larger numbers of people who
are not already committed to our aims.
Paid subscriptions
For people who are willing to pay for a subscription we
have set up a separate paid subscriber e-mail list.
At this stage, paid subscribers will gain no advantage over free
subscribers other than the satisfaction of supporting Healthy Skepticism.
Subscribers are essential for our core funding so Healthy Skepticism can
only succeed if we have your continuing support.
In the future we hope to give paid subscribers ways to participate by
voting on issues on our website etc. (see Subscriber Participation below.)
Calendar year paid subscriptions
In Australia we have been counting subscribers as
paid up from the month that they first paid a subscription to the same month of
the next year. This has caused a
lot of confusion. Consequently, we
have decided to move to calendar year subscription periods.
From now on we will start requesting resubscriptions from all paid
subscribers in November every year to cover the following year.
This new arrangement will be more efficient and make financial planning
easier for us.
Consequently we will not be requesting any more subscription payments until
November 2001. If you feel that we
are under-charging you then please feel welcome to make a donation via our
website.
Subscriber
participation
One of the strengths of our original focus on
letters to drug companies about marketing was that it gave subscribers an
opportunity for personal participation in the process.
Consequently it is important for us to develop new ways for subscribers
to be involved. At this stage the best ways to be involved in Healthy
Skepticism are by promoting our work to others, by notifying us of material
suitable to be posted on our website or linked to from our website and by
writing original material for our website eg. about experiences at CME events
sponsored by drug companies or particularly bad experiences with drug company
representatives, etc.
As mentioned above, all subscribers are requested to visit www.healthyskepticism.org
to register as a free subscriber or as a paid subscriber (No payment will be
required until November 2001).
Please copy the following form if you want to continue receiving the
International News via post until your subscription runs out and e-mail to peter.mansfield@flinders.edu.au
Dear Peter,
(Please delete the sentences that do not apply.)
Please continue sending me MaLAM International News editions by post until my
current subscription runs out.
I will / I have registered as a subscriber on www.healthyskepticism.org
I have the following comments on the changes described in the November/December
edition of MaLAM International News.
Please update my contact details as follows.
Yours sincerely,