Pharmaceutical Companies and Physicians Appropriate Relationships

Pharmaceutical Companies and Physicians: A Discussion The power of pharmaceutical companies cannot and should not be underestimated in any manner. Their power is immense as is their influence and more consumers need to understand how they constantly shape the industries of health, medicine and wellness. However, it’s important to acknowledge the intensity of the connection between doctors and pharmaceutical companies.

This is a connection that begins when doctors are in medical school—they are subjected to a barrage of gifts, meals, trinkets and drug samples that starts early and continues on throughout their professional careers (Kshirsagar &Vu, 2016). Clearly this rapport creates a conflict of interest that can be damaging to the healthcare system. In order to protect themselves, consumers and citizens everywhere should demand a greater level of transparency in regards to how doctors are being compensated among other things.

This paper will discuss in depth the necessity for a higher level of transparency in this regard and how this will directly benefit both the individual and society. Federal legislation requiring a disclosure of payments made to physicians should be mandatory. It is crucial for citizens to know the amount and extent that doctors are being compensated by these pharmaceutical companies. However, it can’t simply be dollar amounts that are revealed.

Pharmaceutical companies are incredibly sneaky and would likely find ways to evade this by changing the way that they compensate doctors. For example, they might start sending doctors more expensive gifts such as vacations, cars, donations made to their children’s schools, bricks of gold, cash gifts that can evade reporting, or paying for repairs/renovations on physicians’ homes. Federal legislation needs to be rigorous and state that every single gift or financial token or assistance the doctors receive from pharmaceutical companies must be reported.

Federal law should be as rigorous as humanly possible in this regards, but states should absolutely have the freedom to engage in more comprehensive requirements, if they so desire. As our textbook states “Vermont, for example, now bans most gifts to physicians, while requiring disclosure of payments for speaking, consulting, and research” (Burns et al., 2011). This is crucial as Vermont was one of the states that was hit most hard with the opioid crisis.

It is unclear to what extent that unhealthy and somewhat corrupt pharmaceutical company-physician connection contributed to this crisis—just that it did. Thus, if states in the union want to create the most stringent and severe requirements in this regard with the harshest penalties for violation, they are well within their rights to do so. Doing so will likely be beneficial for the rest of the nation as it will set a good example for other states.

It will ultimately demonstrate what an appropriate relationship does and does not look like between doctors and pharmaceutical representatives. These harsh requirements might strike some as overdone, but in reality, they need to be this severe in order to protect consumers and thwart another opioid crisis from occurring, motivated by greed alone. Thus, I would indeed advocate that more states enact legislation like Vermont’s or New Hampshire’s. Vermont is a state that has clearly learned from the grave mistakes of its past.

“ Deaths from opioid-related overdoses jumped nearly 160 percent in Vermont between 2010 and 2016, and they continue to rise, while more than half of the 266 young children in state custody are there because of opioid abuse issues, according to a draft report from the governor’s opioid council formed to bolster the state’s response to the crisis” (Rathke, 2017). This opioid crisis did not come from nowhere.

One of the definitive places that it emerged from was without a doubt, from the over-prescription of opioids from doctors who were practicing from out of the hip-pocket of pharmaceutical companies. The fact that Vermont has such severe legislation in place that gives a very strict warning sign to all doctors about the consequences of letting greed and the seductive methods of big pharma override their ethics. We depend on doctors to be ethical and if they are not, they need to face the consequences of their actions.

As history has demonstrated, relying on “voluntary efforts” is merely a situation where human greed will take over the common sense of professionals who know better. Hoping that people will voluntarily report or thwart any problematic practices in the face of all the money and influence of big pharma is naïve and unrealistic at best. At worst, it is a lax policy that will do little more than set up the nation for another opioid crisis or its equivalent.

I do not have concern that disclosure regulations might discourage the formation of beneficial relationships between health care professionals and pharmaceutical and medical device companies, such as those that support research, product development, or educational efforts. Pharmaceutical companies aren’t going anywhere. They need to constantly develop products that the public.