Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2050

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: news

Use strictly as directed
Sydney Morning Herald 2005 Aug 12

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments: Gradually, the medical profession, after having its collective conscience incessantly pricked by organisations like Healthy Skepticism, is starting to feel a bit uneasy about having the culinary appetites of its members regularly satiated courtesy of the pharmaceutical industry.
But the call of a free feed is hard to resist!
The pharmaceutical industry can see the link between between these magic puddings and the magic of manipulating drug prescribing patterns ( which is why they are willing to pay), but most doctors still remain in a self-serving state of denial.

Full text:

Use strictly as directed
Date: 12/08/2005
Words: 408
Sydney Morning Herald, Page: 12

Sydney’s top restaurateurs are happy just now. Two medical conferences
this month have attracted thousands of delegates from all over the
world, and drug company marketers are eager to show them the best Sydney
has to offer. Bookings are very healthy. It is a small part of the
enormous effort which drug companies routinely put into marketing their
products – an effort which some doctors find troubling.

The Australasian College of Physicians, in a draft code of ethics, wants
members to keep drug companies at arm’s length: members should refuse
the companies’ offers of free samples and all gifts, the code says. The
college is right to be wary of the companies’ blandishments – even
though the companies themselves have every right to market their
products freely.

The companies’ marketing effort runs from the trivial – stationery
bearing the name of a drug and its maker’s logo – to the pervasive –
sponsorship of medical conferences and of patient groups which lobby
Canberra bureaucrats to have a drug listed on the Pharmaceutical
Benefits Scheme. The rising cost pressures on the entire health system
are heightened, in part at least, by lobby groups’ demands for the
latest, most expensive drugs.

Drug companies are not viewed with much affection. Their relentless
marketing naturally arouses suspicion. Highly publicised problems with
some drugs have tarnished a record of achievement which overall should
be a matter of pride: drugs are getting better all the time, and we live
better lives as a result. The companies argue that research costs money;
that without profits research is impossible; that their marketing effort
is therefore central to continuing progress in medicine. To this their
critics respond that the resources put into marketing dwarf those for
research – a strange ordering of priorities. Moreover, the desire for
profits pushes them to work against the broader public interest.
Government attempts to cut the cost of drugs are subverted. Products are
marketed which medicalise conditions such as depression and
hyperactivity for which drugs may not be the best solution.

Both sides make valid points. But drug companies, driven by a desire for
profit, are not going to be replaced or superseded. Society will always
have to deal with the problems they throw up if it is to benefit from
the medical advances they produce. Doctors and the public must be alert
to the ways in which this arrangement can fail, and ready to act when it
does. The physicians’ rule is one place to start.
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