PART III
CONTRIBUTIONS FROM THE JOURNAL: PROPRIETARY PRODUCTS
NOSTRUMS IN RETROSPECT
A Series of Nine Articles Reviewing Worthless or Unscientific Proprietary Mixtures Previously Criticized
S. Q. Lapius, M.D.
[Foreword.—It is more than twelve years since the Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry of the American Medical Association was created. Since then there have been but few issues of The Journal that have not called the attention of the medical profession to the debasing influence on scientific medicine of unscientific or worthless proprietary mixtures advertised to physicians for their use in prescribing. The Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry has investigated and shown many of these preparations to be fraudulent in one way or another, and these reports have been published in The Journal. In spite of this, these preparations have been advertised continuously to physicians, through medical journals and otherwise, and prescribed by a large number of physicians. One reason for this is that there are many physicians who have never seen these reports—who were not in active practice at the time, or who were not reading The Journal. We probably have among our readers at the present time 35,000 or 40,000 physicians who were not among the readers of The Journal twelve years ago. It is desirable, then, that we should take up, in more or less detail, several of the more widely advertised products that have been the subjects of previous reports. It has been repeatedly stated in The Journal that many of the proprietary mixtures—the so-called ethical proprietaries advertised to physicians—were no better and no worse than “patent medicines” advertised to the public.
Every physician who has the welfare of medicine at heart should put these questions squarely to himself if he has not already taken a firm stand on this whole problem: What is my attitude toward the work of the Council? Are its reports worthy of acceptance? Am I upholding the Council in its efforts to place therapeutics on a rational basis, not by blind faith alone, but by an honestly critical attitude toward it? Am I following the path of indolence by taking the advice of nostrum makers without any serious effort to determine whether they are true or false? In a word, am I really practicing medicine, or am I an unpaid agent and a dupe of nostrum makers? There are other revolutions than political. The public can be wronged just as certainly by the abuse of its confidence in clinicians as by the usurpers of political power, and when the public is thoroughly aroused the heavy hand of retribution is not likely to be too discriminating. That the sins of clinicians are standing out plain for any one who wishes to read is becoming more and more evident. There is but one short and ugly word that properly characterizes the physician who accepts a fee for prescribing that about which he has no more knowledge than has the one for whom he prescribes it. Are you with the nostrum makers or with decent medicine?