E-drug: Re: UK consumers reject direct advertising by drug industry
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Dear All E-drug Users,
Health consumers in the UK raised concerns that I entirely consider valid.
We all know that any independent public health education system that lacks a
component on mass education on the use of medicines has a deficiency.
Naturally, just as air rushes for a vacuum, upon prompting, some programme
will have to come up to balance-up the deficiency.
The irony, however, with many of these programmes is the quality of the
messages that they deliver. You can't trust information about a product
from a firm seeking to make sales. Moreover, the target audiences aren't
health workers. Such audiences lack capacity to discern messages or even
perform cost-benefit analyses of alternatives.
Private drug companies never start businesses for charity. The costs which
the drug firms will incur, in the bid to educate masses, will rightly be
reflected in the ultimate retail prices. They are looking for profit,
survival, and any operational costs have to be recovered from the sales and,
this is right. Jesus Christ, the God-man who lives to love the unlovable,
blessed making money in business. This is very clear in His classical
discourse of the parable of the talents recorded in the bible; Matthew 25:
14 -- 30.
In addition to all this, the World Health Organisation developed courses for
mass drug-use education dubbed, "Promoting Rational Drug Use in The
Community", and I urge all pharmacists with clinical skills, working in
public health education programmes to invest in these courses.
So instead of sinking resources into proof reading, editing, revising
information from firms (and all that) public health education systems should
work on their basic responsibility--Let them deliver quality messages on the
use of medicines to consumers.
We also know that consumers are taxed to fund public health education
systems! Why should this major component of public-drug use education be
ignored in these systems? Why are some Governments handing-over public-drug
use education to the private sector which has all the potential either to
corrupt even the supposedly most saintly persons or bias the information?
Though an independent information system may as well be corrupted, the risk
of biasing the drug information is lower with it than when lee-way is
availed in the policy of direct-to-potential patient advertisement.
George Kibumba
Teaching Assistant, Clinical Pharmacy
Dept Of Pharmacy, Makerere University
P.O.BOX 7072, KAMPALA.
e-mail: kibumba@yahoo.com
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