Ethical Issues of Practitioners and Pharmaceutical Industry Collaboration: Influence on Proscribing Habits

Introduction

Interactions between physicians and pharmaceutical industry have been increased significantly in over the last several years and it becomes such common activities. These interactions will lead to the conflict of interest between physician's duties to the patient and the pharmaceutical industry interest to sell the products as much as possible, in other words, profit-seeking behavior. Dr. Marius Widjajarta, Head of Indonesian Health Consumers Empowerment Foundation (YPKKI) has estimated $500 billion is spent each year by pharmaceutical companies in promotion and marketing and the total amounts of money circulating among physicians is more than 20 % and more than $500 billion. (Parker and Pettijohn 27-43)

Literature Review

Nowadays, competition in the pharmaceutical industry is at all-time high. Pharmaceutical industry becomes more and more to competing each others. In order to sell their products much more, they have to increase the sales strategy by attracting physicians through the aggressiveness of medical representatives. They tend to have more frequent visits to encourage physicians to prescribe drugs and thus increase sales. (Granja 61-68)

They visit physicians in a regular basis, week or month, to promote the drug's advantages and even push the physicians toward to use their products. The physicians are, in general, sneaking away, trying to hide from medical representatives, since there are too many and they are too pushy and there is too little time, and the representatives probably have noticed that the reluctant physicians have always less time for short meetings and less interest and tend to reduce the time of the visit. (Granja 61-68)

Medical representatives often increase their sales by giving several gifts to the physicians in order to use their products. One of the medical representatives, said that they usually give physicians gifts such as cash money, funding for attend medical seminar, and high-value items if physicians use their products, Tika also added, the more prescribes given to the physicians, the more their bonuses received from pharmaceutical industry.

Research Question

How does the number of monthly Pharmaceutical Sales Representatives visits affect doctors prescribing patterns?

Hypothesis

Doctors that are often visited by a Sales Representative are more likely to prescribe compounds that the particular representative is promoting.

Discussion

Medical representatives often increase their sales by giving several gifts to the physicians in order to use their products. One of the medical representatives, Tika, in Pangkal Pinang said that they usually give physicians gifts such as cash money, funding for attend medical seminar, and high-value items if physicians use their products, Tika also added, the more prescribes given to the physicians, the more their bonuses received from pharmaceutical industry. (Brody 82-85)

Interactions between physicians and medical representatives were found to start as early as medical school and to continue well into practice. Such interactions are gifts, samples, industry-paid meals, funding for travel or lodging to attend educational symposia, CME (Continuing Medical Education) sponsorship, honoraria, research funding, and employment.

These interactions would lead to diminish objectivity of professional judgments and conflict of interests of physicians. Thus conflict of interests would violate best interests ...