Pharma Compliance Programs Labeled Advertising
The following content, including the specific spelling and punctuation, originally appeared at BIGPHARMA’S IS WATCHING YOU!!!!:
[Note: This entry appeared, as below, in English, but most of the entries in the blog itself, Núcleo Duro de Farmácia, are written in Portuguese. "Revista Prescrire International" is a pharmaceutical journal from which the blog excerpted this quotation and, I assume, the cartoon.]
BIGPHARMA’S IS WATCHING YOU!!!!
BIG PHARMA’S MEDICATION COMPLIANCE PROGRAMMES: JUST SAY NO!
“To comply or not to comply. For several years, pharmaceutical companies have been investing in new ways to retain their “customers”, for example under the guise of programmes designed to help patients follow long-term treatment courses. Treatment compliance, i.e. the notion that a patient follows to the letter a treatment prescribed by a doctor or recomended by a pharmacist, has its good and bad sides. A patient who stops treatment to soon may suffer ill efects. Sometimes, however, a patient has good reasons for stopping treatment, because of adverse effects, for example, or inefficacy. The decision to continue or to stop long-term treatment can be a difficult one, and should be discussed by the patient and a healthcare profissional.
Pharmaceutical companies’intrusion into patient “coaching” started in the United States, where drugs are more heavily commercialised than in Europe. Pharmaceutical companies set their own prices in the Unites States, and can promote precription-only drugs directly to the public. “Medication compliance programmes”, which are simply a sophisticated form of advertising, are flourishing. Such programmes are starting to enter France by the back door.”
Revista Prescrire International
Fevereiro 2007
Commentary
While I’ve argued, in previous posts such as Miracle On 34th Street — The Patient Compliance Version, Making Pharma-supported Compliance Programs Independent Of Marketing, and Pharma-Supported Compliance Programs: Today’s Problems & Tomorrow’s Solutions, that, deservedly or not, compliance programs administered by marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies face mistrust from patients and clinicians, today’s entry is less subtle, describing pharma-supported compliance programs as “simply a sophisticated form of advertising.” The cartoon (the dollar signs for eyes are especially fetching) is even more blatant.
Now would be a good time to separate marketing and compliance.
Updated
France Rejects Attempt To Legalize Pharma’s Medication Compliance Programs
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