Drug promotional literature

Due to their concise nature, busy medical practitioners may sometimes rely on DPLs as the primary sources of drug information: DPLs can be highly informative when they provide the authentic information in a nutshell, as long as they have been critically analysed and reviewed; if not, they can be misleading.

In addition, pharmaceutical companies have to follow certain ethical guidelines at the national and international level for drug promotional activities to ensure better health care through the rational use of medicines: for instance, the World Health Organisation (WHO) states that “all promotion-making claims concerning medicinal drugs should be reliable, accurate, truthful, informative, balanced, up to date, capable of substantiation and in good taste”.

Unfortunately, physicians may be influenced by extensive marketing and may hastily prescribe new products without confirming the validity of the claims, which can in turn result in possible detrimental health-related consequences, e.g. failure of treatment from the use of inappropriate drugs, undesirable/adverse effects, rise in antibiotic-resistant microorganisms or an increase in the national health care expenditure.

Because DPLs influence the prescribing behaviour of medical practitioners, they have to be critically analysed for their content to prevent irrational prescribing patterns. Medical practitioners should therefore play a significant role in the critical evaluation of the information provided in a DPL before considering it as a scientific source of information and forward more complaints about such non compliant companies to regulatory authorities.

Thus, ethical promotion of drugs and their rational prescription is possible with the combined efforts of medical practitioners, pharmaceutical companies and regulatory bodies. In turn, these efforts will ensure that promotional literature is not just a marketing strategy but also a useful, up to date and accurate source of drug information.