http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/health_medical/story.jsp?story=626502
Drugs firms turning Britain into 'pill for every ill' society
By Colin Brown, Deputy Political Editor
05 April 2005
Britain is being turned into "pill for every ill" society by the
multibillion-pound drugs industry, which encourages patients to take
medication for "unhappiness", according to a committee of MPs.
The drugs industry was heavily criticised for promoting the wider use
of medication to increase its profits in a report by the influential
Commons Select Committee on Health. The MPs called for tighter controls
on the promotion of new drugs until more was known about their
side-effects. Family doctors were also blamed by the MPs for
prescribing anti-depressants "indiscriminately on a grand scale".
At the end of an extensive review of Britain's booming drugs industry,
the committee said "a major and recurring issue" it confronted was the
increased use of medicines to treat every problem in society, which the
MPs called "a pill for every ill".
They said it was easy to believe everybody in Britain would be taking a
pill every day before long with those over 55 being prescribed statins
to stop heart attacks, and anti-depressants being over-prescribed.
"Unhappiness is part of the spectrum of human experience, not a medical
condition," said the MPs. "There is a strong and growing tendency to
believe that life's problems are best dealt with as medical conditions.
"People hope for health solutions and come to rely on the inspiration
of 'get well' messages from commercial and professional sources rather
than focus on sometimes grim realities." The committee, chaired by the
Labour MP David Hinchliffe, a former social worker, said the drugs
industry had not created the trend, but it had encouraged it with its
£1.65bn marketing and promotion budget, compared to only £4.5m spent
by the Department of Health.
"There is reason to fear that the industry has positively nurtured
anxieties about ill-health," said the committee. It is alleged that the
industry was driven by pressure from its investors and the influence of
its marketing force and advertising agencies, rather than its
scientists.
The MPs warned the increased promotion of drugs could lead to
"unsustainable demand on the NHS", a confused vision of how good health
was maintained and a failure to ensure preventive public health
measures were at the forefront of health policy.
"The aggressive promotion of medicines shortly after launch, the sheer
volume of information that is received by prescribers and the
'promotional hospitality masquerading as education' all contribute to
the inappropriate prescription of medicines," said the MPs.
Drugs industry chiefs told the committee that self-regulation should be
maintained. But the MPs concluded: "Breaches of advertising
regulations, cover-up of negative medicines information and provision
of misleading information to prescribers suggest that self-regulation
is not working."
They called for an end to the practice under which respected academics
leant their names to reports on drugs by "ghost writers" without ever
seeing the raw data on which the reports were based.
The MPs also criticised the influence the drugs industry had over GPs,
patients, academics, the media and even the institutions meant to
regulate it, including Parliament.
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TC