Government Needs To Conduct Periodic Prescription Audits to Check Unethical Drug Marketing

-Team@CMHF

• Doctors play in the hands of pharmaceutical companies for commercial gains.
• This  raises many questions, is drug marketing ethical when it’s done by a doctor? Does it exploit fears and vulnerabilities? Is it manipulative and uncaring?
• The function and practice of drug marketing through doctors has been criticised because it deliberately creates partial truths about a particular drug and exploits the fears and weaknesses of patients.
• If it is so then the doctor is acting as marketing agents of pharma companies
• The doctor doing so do not show their professionalism toward their medical profession its noble aspirations
• They also display interesting features like the power, social contributions and venality of a pharmaceutical industry whose products contribute in important ways to the health and longevity of the people.
• Thousands of pharmaceutical companies in the country produce over 70,000 brands of various drug formulations and since the private sector represents 80 percent of the health expenditure, a doctor has automatically been an influential prescriber.
• These drug companies spend around 25 per cent of their annual sale in promoting medicines. If statistics are to be believed each doctor prescribes drugs worth over Rs 50,000 per annum.
• Representatives of these drug companies give gifts, better referred as brand reminders, to doctors, to keep their brand in the doctor’s memory. These gifts vary from desktop items to minor medical equipment.
• Even as these brand reminders from drug companies to doctors is an old aged practice, today the situation has started changing rapidly and brand reminders are increasingly being replaced by gifts of greater value.
• Pharmaceutical companies even offer larger incentives to consultants and specialists who are considered good prescribers, as verified by chain of chemists.
• To generate more prescriptions for a particular brand of a medicine, many drug companies link the incentives with the number of prescriptions generated by the doctor.
• These companies even fix targets for doctors, with incentives like a cell phone handset, an air cooler, a car depending upon a particular number of tablets prescribed!
• So the drug companies spend more on medical drug promotion rather than research and development because drug promotion is what earns them huge profits.
• This is simply unethical drug promotion threatening the society.
• Relationship between doctors and the drug industry should be with the common aim of improving human health and safe and effective medicines. There should be check and balances on the pharmaceutical company promoting their products in the state.
• Treatment guidelines should be issued by the government for the doctors in terms of prescribing medicines and conducting periodic prescription audits?
• There is need to frame comprehensive legislation to make all health care professionals accountable to the system and ensure that the drug companies comply with the National criteria for drug promotion as well as WHO Ethical Criteria for Medicinal Drug Promotion.
• Union government is in the process of formulating a new set of ethical marketing guidelines under which drug firms will be barred from offering freebies to doctors — free travel tickets, hotel stay, gifts and hospitality, and the like.
• If any drug firm is found violating these guidelines, the responsibility would lie squarely with the MD and CEO of the respective company.
• The new guidelines would also prohibit drug firms to get doctors to endorse their products both online and offline.
• Last year the MCI had already prohibited doctors from accepting freebies from drug firms but the norms have not been able to achieve the desired results fully.
• This is because while the provisions could lead to the cancellation of the registration of the doctors if found guilty, the drug firms got away scot free.
• However, the new guidelines are still being seen as being soft on drug firms. If MCI had the powers to cancel the registration of medicos found guilty of unethical marketing of drugs, similarly the licenses of the guilty drug firm should also be cancelled by amending the Drugs and Cosmetics Act.

For further reading log on to
http://www.greaterkashmir.com/news/2011/Dec/24/of-medico-marketer-1.asp