Healthy Skepticism's Dr Peter Mansfield - now booking for world tour 2008

Dr Peter Mansfield OAM BMBS is an Australian GP and Director of the excellent organisation Healthy Skepticism, an international non-profit organisation for health professionals and everyone with an interest in improving health. Their main aim is to improve health by reducing harm from misleading drug promotion.

Peter is also a Lecturer, Discipline of General Practice, at the University of Adelaide.

Peter will be giving a seminar in Cologne, Germany on a Monday between 21 April and 26 May 2008 inclusive for IQWiG (The Institute for Quality and Efficiency in Health Care).

When asked about his talks he told PharmaGossip:

Many doctors believe that to suggest that they are influenced by drug promotion is to insult their professionalism, integrity, intelligence and education. In the 1840s doctors felt similarly insulted by the suggestion that they should wash their hands before delivering babies especially after doing autopsies of women who had died of childbed fever.

Those doctors were intelligent and well intentioned but did not understand the risk of invisible microbes. Nowadays the existence of invisible microbes is well accepted so the idea that we should wash our hands is not regarded as a personal insult.

We are now going through a similar paradigm shift towards understanding the risk of invisible unintended bias from exposure to industry influence techniques.

Just as professionalism, integrity, intelligence and education provide little protection against invisible microbes they also provide little protection from invisible bias.

To help understand this lack of protection please consider the example of a space shuttle commander. Space shuttle commanders are the elite of elite pilots. They are highly intelligent and very well trained. However, space shuttle commanders have to trust the experts in mission control to tell them if all systems are go for launch or not. They do not have the time to get out of the cockpit and check all the systems themselves. Nor do they have all the specific skills required. If mission control is wrong then they will be misled and they and their crews will die.

Intelligence and education do not protect people from being misled when they trust a source of information that happens to be wrong. Intelligence and education give us the ability to see through some promotional techniques some of the time. However, we rarely have the time and specific skills required to see through them all.

Cologne marks the "first gig" of a potential world tour - which could cover Europe and North America in April, May or June.

If you would like to invite Peter to speak please get in touch with him at: peter.mansfield@adelaide.edu.au