PLoS Medicine calls for end to drug promotion

November 7, 2006 at 5:00 pm | In Prescribing Extra - Other |

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.