Lies, damned lies, and marketing: an editor’s lament

Many of the articles published in the ICC COLUMN have emphasized the plight that respiratory patients around the world have in obtaining satisfactory access to appropriate medications and health care. Two main problems have been identified. The first involves the high costs that prevent many patients from obtaining care (1). The second involves the difficulty to determine whether or not new medications, diagnostic procedures, and treatments actually do benefit patient outcomes. This paper provides an editor’s perspective on how the marketing activities of proprietary organizations make it difficult to assess published clinical research that is intended to determine the value of treatments. Some of the data mentioned in this article have been previously published and referenced in the ICC COLUMN (2) and in another publication (3).