Spanish doctors urge colleagues not to accept gifts from drug manufacturers. An initiative group of doctors recalls ethics in the relationship between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry.
Health professionals have begun to tackle the pressure that pharmaceutical companies are trying to put on them, reports… The pressure scheme is familiar to all doctors in the world, of all specialties: a representative of the company meets with them, tries to charm, talks about the advantages of the proposed drug and reinforces the words with a pleasant gift to the doctor himself. It is assumed that after that the doctor will prescribe the drug being promoted to the patients.
The goals of the No Gracias initiative group (“No thanks”), which includes Spanish doctors of various specialties, is “to remind doctors that treatment should be based on the patient’s needs and scientific data, and not on the advertising campaigns of drug manufacturers.” This group is part of the international movement (“No free lunches”; the usual procedure for “seducing” an influential doctor is to invite him to dinner at the expense of a representative of a pharmaceutical company).
The movement’s website is addressed to doctors and medical students, and is designed to help them become more independent from promotions, from which patients may end up suffering: they will get the wrong or unjustifiably expensive drug just because the doctor feels obliged to someone.