Most people have gotten a doctor's prescription at some point in their lives for a medicine they have needed. Some people need prescription medication on a regular basis due to their medical problems. The question is, to what degree can you trust that your doctor writes a prescription based only on your best interests as a patient?

Gardiner Harris writes in The New York Times about the growing scandal over doctors receiving large checks, some has high as six figures, in exchange for prescribing that pharmaceutical company’s medicines as opposed to others:

Just about every big global drug company — including Johnson & Johnson, Wyeth and Bristol-Myers Squibb — has disclosed in securities filings that it has received a federal subpoena, and most are juggling subpoenas stemming from several investigations. ... At the heart of the various investigations into drug industry marketing is the question of whether drug companies are persuading doctors — often through payoffs — to prescribe drugs that patients do not need or should not use or for which there may be cheaper alternatives. Investigators are also seeking to determine whether the companies are manipulating prices to cheat the federal Medicaid and Medicare health programs.

[M]ost drug makers now spend twice as much marketing medicines as they do researching them. Their sales teams have changed from a scattering of semiretired pharmacists to armies of young women and men who shower physicians with attention, food and - until the drug industry recently agreed to end the practice - expensive gifts, just to get two to three minutes to pitch their wares. A code of conduct adopted in 1990 by the American Medical Association suggests that doctors should not accept any gift worth more than $100, but the guidelines are widely ignored.

One of the companies under close investigation is Schering-Plough. According to reports, they not only paid doctors big money to use their drug, but they shut off doctors who “wrote prescriptions for competing drugs, participated in clinical trials of alternatives to Intron A [their hepatitis C treatment] or even spoke favorably about treatments besides Intron A.”

It’s almost understatement to simply label such practices “unethical.” For the doctors in particular these sorts of things violate all of the most fundamental ethical principles requires of physicians going back thousands of years. Yes, medicine and health are a big business, but doctors are expected to put the patients’ needs first, not their personal need to line their own pockets at the expense of patients and taxpayers. Doctors who participated in these programs should, in my opinion, lose their licenses to practice medicine.

As for the companies that bribed physicians... well, fines are an obvious punishment, but is there anything else that can be done? One creative solution might be to take away their patents on the drugs they bribed physicians to use. Take them away and immediately place them in the public domain for everyone to use. If they used illegal tactics to increase profits on a certain drug, it makes a certain amount of sense to punish them by limiting their ability to continue profiting on that drug. If we can punish people and companies by taking away physical property (fines, confiscation), then why not by taking away intellectual property as well?

Read More:

• Guide to Ethics and Morality
• News About Ethics
• Bioethics