The Bee again reveals its liberal cynacism in yesterday's editorial about pharmaceutical companies. The editorial stated the Bee editorist's approval with Kaiser Permanente Medical Group's recent initiation of conflict of interest rules that prevent doctors from accepting gifts from pharmaceutical companies. Fine, no problem. But the Bee goes off on a tangent and accuses doctors of likely prescribing drugs that patients are aware of from advertising rather than perscribe what is in the patients best interests. What!
Specifically the Bee states, "Since doctors like to keep their patients happy, they end up prescribing heavily advertised medications, even if they may not be the best therapeutic choice." If the word "doctors" was changed to "blacks" or "jews", this would be considered as a generalization bordering on racism.
So according to the Bee the patients dictate the medicines they take, and whose fault is this? Well, the pharmaceutical companies of course. The Bee takes the swipe at doctors to get to the end point of the editorial, which is a slam on the pharmaceuticals: "[T]he the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America had the chutzpah to claim that drug industry advertising actually "empowers" patients, instead of misinforming them." Apparently, advertising is by definition misleading and does not empower the patients.
Perhaps the Bee would have the pharmaceutical companies empoyerment limited to those multi-page folded pieces of paper accompanying all medicines which contains details about the drugs in the smallest possible print. Everyone reads those. The editorial page writers did not explain why it stereotypes doctors to hapless boobs and the pharmaceutical industry advertising as always "misleading." It just makes the accusations as if they are obvious points.
Posted by Apiarist at April 30, 2005 02:21 PM | TrackBack