published letters

Published in The Age on Saturday, August 5, 2006

RE DOCTORS and the drug industry ( The Age, 4/8). Yesterday, I received an unsolicited gift of a large chocolate cake from a drug company, decorated with its name and product. I presumed the company wished me to share it with my staff, and perhaps my favourite patients of the morning. It’s called marketing.

Despite the Australian Medical Association’s insistence that doctors are superhuman and unaffected by marketing, the evidence points the opposite way. Self-regulation for the drug industry is a farce. Yesterday’s reports demonstrate that self-regulation of doctors doesn’t work. Detailing gifts and perks to doctors on the internet as proposed by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission is good but tinkering at the edges. It’s time the Federal Government regulated the industry and doctors and/or vastly expanded its paltry $20 million a year spending on drug education for doctors.

How can this compete with the industry’s $1 billion marketing budget?

Dr Tim Woodruff, president, Doctors Reform Society, Richmond