Thursday, October 9. 2008
Mutual Support
As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities - Voltaire
There is a way to ensure that groups of individuals, all suffused by the same culture, serve the public good and not just each other and it is to make them accountable to a much larger group of people, each with a different view of the situation - in other words, democracy. The government drugs advisory industry and indeed politicians themselves could not stand out against a far greater number of people who had been informed of the benzodiazepine scandal and wanted something done about it.
Democratic accountability is infinitely superior to allowing professions such as medicine or politics, effectively to deny and distort logic and withhold protection from citizens .
Independence of the medics is misplaced in the known context of drug company shenanigans and is one of those establishment-serving fictions beloved of politicians who want things to be kept at arms length in case things get awkward. And in a democratic society, things would certainly have got very awkward for successive generations of politicians who watched and denied while the ignorance of medicine and its regulators turned well people in sick people and took away their human rights to pursue relationships and a normal economic life.
It is, according to behavioural scientists, a need to be with people who are like us that makes us join up with others whom we sound like, have the same interests and a similar background. That is why politicians, prescribers and drug regulators sing from the same hymn sheet in the face of mountains of patient evidence that there is something terribly wrong with the way drug companies, prescribers and regulators behave. Everyone is misguided but them.
People co-operate with and support those who are not family members because in evolution that co-operation has been a successful format. Working with people who will return favours and co-operation is a strategy that has produced successful outcomes. In partnership, politicians, drug company executives, prescribers and drug regulators have in effect competed with the interests of patients, interests, which in reality are not seen as their own, whatever they say or believe. In order to create and maintain groups that can be trusted, those who cannot be trusted are excluded – and that means as far as drugs are concerned the patient client base, the one group of people in society with the experience to judge independently. The health establishment conforms like all common interest groups to group norms, sounding pretty much alike and producing the same self-serving message. Whatever happened, if it was a negative experience - you the patient are responsible for it.
