RESPONDING TO REPROACHES, REBUKES, AND REBUTTALS
Boldly challenging disease-mongering (DTCA, PhRMA, FDA, accountability, clinical guidelines, transparency, RCT, validity, misleading marketing, etc.) will inevitably produce angry and dismissive reactions and rebukes from pharmaceutical companies and others with vested interests in selling sickness. Their strategies? The familiar “D” list: Discredit, deny, delay, deflect, deceive, divide…..destroy.
Don’t be surprised! Be prepared for typical charges leveled at critics such as:
- Critics don’t speak for all (or any) patients (or women or old people or children or...)
- Science is on our side
- Most reputable doctors are on our side
- Critics want to deny people medicines they want and need
- If tests and drugs are so dangerous we would know by now
- The FDA approval process is tested, tried and true
- A muzzled industry harms the health of the public
- Industry and researchers need to partner for better healthcare
- Industry and patients need to partner for better healthcare
- Industry and government need to partner for better healthcare
Have rebuttal arguments and fact sheets prepared, e.g.,:
- Research overwhelmingly shows the destructive interference of commercial factors on research, publishing, and “patient” groups
- Advertising is not and never has been about education, it’s about persuasion
- Statistics can be and often are manipulated to prove whatever
- Partnerships are imbalanced when one of the partners has all the money
- Drug side effects are responsible for more harms than people realize
- Medicalization is a strategy to convert ordinary problems into health risks that require lifelong monitoring and treatment
- Follow the money