Concluding  Remarks

It is the inherent need of science to give something new. It is the inherent need of man to like something new. And both these needs are liable to be exploited due to unethical practices by market forces, both in the pharmaceutical industry and the research field. While man works mainly at the empirical level, pharmaceuticals work essentially at the business level, and science works fundamentally at the process level. How are all these three to be ethically reconciled is the problem before us.

So, then, there we are. While obsession with the most recent can lead us astray and should not become a fad or a game of one-up-manship, a healthy evidence-based acceptance of the new is essential, nay integral, to scientific advance and research in our field.

In this there is an inevitable process of sifting involved, as of personal liking, one’s vision for the future, contemporary predilections of peers and superiors, and the pulls and pressures of market forces, both in the research field and the pharmaceutical industry.*

The need for a healthy evidence-based acceptance of the new we must recognize, and encourage. This need the pharmaceutical industry also recognizes, and may sometimes be prone to exploit.

Well, the branch of psychiatry, as indeed every other branch of medicine, has to beware of this.

But, then, we are cautious when we drive. That does not stop us from driving, does it ?

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*We can still call it the research field, and the pharmaceutical industry. The time may not be far when field may turn into industry. Some very senior practitioners may hopefully take solace in the fact that it may not happen in their lifetime. Well, they might just be proved right. Indications of being proved otherwise are not weak at all!

(Contd.)