Doctors should exercise self-imposed ethics

THE unethical practice of bribing doctors and drug retailers with gifts or financial inducement by pharmaceutical companies in the country poses a serious public health threat. A national daily reported that such immoral and unethical business practice running for many years simply cuts patients’ pocket deeply in absence of proper law and monitoring. It is widely recognized that by getting hefty financial benefits, physicians often prescribe substandard drugs to patients that cause damage of kidney, liver, and heart and even bring deaths in many cases. The toxic paracetamol syrup of Rid Pharmaceuticals that killed at least 28 children in 2009 was also prescribed by physicians at that time. An unknown number of children and adults are being killed prematuredly each year for taking substandard drugs, but the Drug Administration is reluctant to the cause.

A study revealed that the pharmaceutical companies have established a highly structured system encompassing financial inducements, persuasion, emotional blackmail, and offering jobs to family members of the doctors, to generously prescribe their brands and thus to ensure market share. The popular physicians are motivated meticulously by the medical representatives to establish brand loyalty and fulfil individual and company targets. Even, the drug companies employed people to oversee prescriptions of popular physicians after patients come out of the doctors’ chambers. To get market share through prescription, the companies do not hesitate to provide the home appliance to kitchen items to the physicians and retailers that ultimately add with medicine cost.

As per the Code of Pharmaceutical Marketing Practices, “no gift or financial inducement shall be offered or given to members of the medical profession for purposes of sales promotion” but prevailing ground reality sharply contrasts the Code. While the Drugs Act and the Drug Control Ordinance stipulate no punitive measure for violation of the Code, Drug Administration is feeble to enforce the code. Experts said the price of the drug would drop by 70 percent if such unethical marketing is stopped as the companies actually cut the pocket of the patients to meet their marketing cost. The companies may have a policy for promoting their products, but the Drug Administration should take action against them if that goes against public interests or exposes threat to human health. The Drug Administration has not only failed to control immoral business practices of the companies, due to its negligence, the offenders often go scot-free. The Rid Pharma case is the galoring example wherein all 5 persons charged for death of 28 children were acquitted.

We have proved to be a people too weak to tolerate every inhuman act in public life. So we cannot condemn the doctors for being unethical about prescribing drugs not necessary. So, we plead with them for the sake of human life our doctors should follow self-imposed ethical values. Our people are most unlucky in the sense that they cannot elect their own government.