Health: Right of all and Duty of the State

by Paula Consolin

Doctor X is in his office analyzing some patients’ handbooks. Suddenly, his secretary, comes to the room bringing some letters. Twelve out of the fifteen he had received corresponded to an avalanche of papers with medicine advertisings from the most diverse types, and those were the remedies he prescribed the most: “These papers only serve as sponsorships for my registrations and trips”.

The pharmaceutical industry nowadays is among the most successful multinationals in comparison to other economical segments as the telecommunications and electronics. This great success happens mainly due to great investments in marketing carried out by these companies. The above-exemplified narrative corresponds to only one of the strategies that the pharmaceutical industry uses to overlap its economical power to health professionals.

A doctors’ position is not considered incorrect from the point of view of the Medical Ethics Code and it is not characterized as a submission position. All professionals should know how to handle their relationships with the different sectors, as the pharmaceutical and health care equipments industries, thus doctors should be coherent with their convictions and positions. It means, prescribing the most efficient medicine for the treatment of the patients, of lowest cost in the case of need, or the most clinically efficient one, but not the most in evidence in the market due to industry advertisements.

Considering technological advances of the different types of companies in this sector, there have been increases of investments in clinical research and also of the competition among medications due to patent. This stimulates even more investments to the development of new active principles of better effectiveness that may be not so vulnerable to the market. This hunger for new markets is what causes the huge expenses within the advertisement industry.

The currently new developed remedies are made mainly for chronic illnesses, as cardiovascular diseases, cancer, hypertension, amongst others. Why new medicine for acute illnesses as the Malaria, whose treatment time does not exceed six months, are never produced? Because, although the great interest of the pharmaceutical Industry is health, the main objective of the companies is still the profit. If the health problem is solved, but profit is not obtained, the company will not invest on or will not produce the medicine. Pathologies as hypertension or diabetes need to be treated the entire life, therefore the stimulation for new products in this direction is so valued.

Taking this into consideration, due to excessive marketing, depreciation of the medical prescriptions because of advertisements, greater interest in the profitability rather than in health promotion, the pharmaceutical industry has been hardly criticized and devaluated by the social segments and differentiated medias lately. The intention of these critics is to discourage the extreme competition in the health market, so that medicine would not have to be produced or studied to supply more profits to the companies, groups or determined countries, but to improve life conditions of the population, looking for new therapeutic formulas for illnesses still not very well known and also increasing the number of available medicines for the most needed population.

Due to these reasons I believe that we, as medical students, all health professionals, among others, must mobilize ourselves against the health industry monopoly. And this may happen either through published articles or by the reputation of the sponsorships made by the pharmaceutical industry in congresses or still having this discussion in the programming of events. According to Brazilian law, health is a right of all and a duty of the State and not a right of the rich ones for a duty of the Industry. Let us be different of Dr. X,let us be coherent with and convict to the principles that guide the medical profession, which struggles for health and life above all.