Ethics in the pharmaceutical industry: acceptance of responsibility or a facet of marketing?

Ethics in the pharmaceutical industry: acceptance of responsibility or a facet of marketing? 7 Increases in knowledge and growing specialization in the fields of medicine and pharmaceuticals have accentuated a situation in which the patient is as a rule not capable of selecting the medicines most suited to his needs. The patient is obliged to consult a health professional, in whose hands he places his trust and perhaps his life. In putting himself in the hands of an expert, however, he necessarily forfeits a degree of personal sovereignty; for it is the expert who assumes responsibility for the therapeutic decision. Yet the process does not end there. Very commonly the health professional will in making his choice of treatment consider it necessary in tum to rely upon pharmaceutical producers inasmuch as the latter will commonly be his only readily accessible source of information on the medicines which he may consider using; in their capacity as providers of information, the pharmaceutical houses thus necessarily assume responsibility for providing health professionals with drug data which are both accurate and complete. The trust which both the health professional (and through him the patient) put in drug companies clearly must not be abused. All the same, drug companies are fond of stressing the fact that they are free agents; they will commonly prefer· to acknowledge those responsibilities which they themselves have defined or voluntarily assumed (in the form of self-discipline or codes of ethics) rather than accepting a situation in which mandatory standards of behaviour are to be imposed upon them by the community. Fundamental to the entire situation is clearly the apportionment of trust and responsibility between the parties directly concerned, i.e. the state, the health professionals and the industrial producers of pharmaceuticals. It is the balance between the acts (and the omissions) of these three parties which determines the extent of each of the various forms of liberty, responsibility, right and duty which must function if medicines are to be used in a proper manner [1]. In this connection it is interesting to consider the role currently being played by the Ciba-Geigy company in promoting responsible behaviour by the pharmaceutical industry [2].