PLoS Medicine calls for end to drug promotion
November 7, 2006 on 5:00 pm | In Prescribing Extra - Other |
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PLoS Medicine has published an article calling for changes to the way healthcare professionals learn about medicines.
The article makes four recommendations:
- All health professionals should be educated explicitly about decision making and evaluation of evidence and promotion
- Health professionals should be helped to understand that there is no proven method for enabling them to gain more benefit than harm from promotion
- Health professionals should be helped to understand their responsibility to avoid pharmaceutical and device promotion
- Health professionals should be educated explicitly about the most reliable sources of information
The article states that misleading promotion can be a threat to health and states that there is evidence that “pharmaceutical promotion correlates with medically inappropriate and wasteful use of pharmaceuticals“. It is proposed that individual clinicians should avoid one-to-one meetings with sales representatives and be aware of the benefit-to-harm ratio of promotion.
Action: All healthcare professionals should carefully consider the educational benefits provided during exposure to pharmaceutical promotion before agreeing to meet with sales representatives.
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