2023-05-24 07:58:56
It would take a 20-volume encyclopedia to simply enumerate the list of biases in studies released by the food and pharmaceutical industries. It would take ten times more for the list of declared links between their leaders and opinion leaders in nutrition and medicine and a hundred times more for their undeclared conflicts of interest. Whether I overestimate or underestimate the number of tomes, the facts are well known to those who observe these two areas where manipulation is particularly easy.
But the real problem is elsewhere, it lies in the fact that prescribers are not aware of the influences they are subject to.
The “illusion of unique invulnerability” is called the fact that each prescriber is convinced that he is not influenced by these promotional studies.
Since the 1990s, this cognitive bias has been highlighted by several large surveys of students, doctors and academics. Only 1% of doctors think that pharmaceutical marketing influences their prescriptions and 60% to 80% think that it influences the prescriptions of their colleagues. The most numerous of these self-declared invulnerables being academics and even more the notoriously industry-submissive opinion leaders.
As I myself felt invulnerable to any propaganda, I did not understand why advertisements for medicines, cars, perfumes, insurance, banks and detergents invaded my favorite media. Now that I know that 80% of my fellow citizens are sensitive to them, I conclude that they are only intended for them. Not mine, obviously!
Most doctors deny that gifts influence their prescriptions, and the more gifts they receive, the less likely they are to believe it has an effect on their prescriptions.
Congress and research funding increases academic pressure on the authorities to authorize the marketing of a food supplement or a drug regardless of the results of studies. Exposure to sales representatives decreases the ability to recognize inaccurate drug claims.
The countless studies denouncing biases and manipulations have never succeeded in modifying the habits of medical prescriptions. Will these new surveys succeed in shaking prescribers in their deep conviction of invulnerability?
It is likely not, the majority of opinion leaders certainly have the ability to convince that these surveys are biased and have no value. Because, in pharmaceutical or agro-food promotion, nothing is more formidably effective than a biaser – spelling is important – who attacks biases.
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