For years now, some Pharma companies follow unhealthy tactics to get doctors promote their medicines – unethical marketing of drugs. As on today, in India there is so-called voluntary code designed to prevent companies from providing incentives like vacations in India and abroad and other freebies to influence their prescribing behaviour. Everyone know that self regulation doesn’t work in India. These marketing techniques result in high cost o the medicines; desirable prescription of generic medicines is over-looked; unnecessary and harmful prescription of new medicines by doctors, negligence of poor patients by the doctors, etc. There are other issues such as: clinical trials of new drugs with fudged data, counterfeit drugs, unnecessary referrals to super specialists and for tests involving radiation exposures such as MRI, CT scans, X-ray examination, etc for kick-back considerations. The practice is further encouraged by the fact that employers/insurance companies foot the bills of the middle class.
In country like India, where the public health care is pathetic and majority of the lower and lower middle class are not covered under any schemes for paying for health care, it is the prime responsibility of the government to bring in stringent legislation proving heavy penalties, to curb this unethical marketing of medicines. Though, there is ban on doctors accepting freebies since the beginning of this year imposed by the Medical Council of India, which became infamous with corruption at the highest level, nothing seems to change. Nobody cares! Nobody to take action on the violators!
Today, July 1 is the Doctors’ Day and do you care?
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