Marketing physician-directe

Pharmaceutical marketing is directed to a large extent at audiences who are not the ultimate users of the products (i.e., physicians, pharmacists, HMO managers). 

The pharmaceutical physician provides a medical direction to marketing strategy and ensures that product literature and promotional material are legal and factually accurate. This is an important contribution to the medical department s role as medical conscience, as discussed in Section 10.2. Medical input remains necessary to the servicing and support of marketed products throughout their life cycle. 

It is then necessary to review the meaning of special needs. It is difficult to see how such needs can exist where there is a licensed version of the product on the market for the physician to use. However tempting it may be for medical institutions to save costs by requesting an unlicensed version of a licensed product, economic needs will never be special needs in this context. This accords with the rationale underlying the Directive, which requires only authorised medicinal products to be placed on the market unless exceptional circumstances apply. 

Currently only two countries, the United States and New Zealand, permit pharmaceutical manufacturers to market directly to consumers, where consumers are defined as potential ordinary patients and not as health care providers. The United States also now permits direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) for prescribed medical devices. Whether DTCA should be permitted at all, permitted but only with much more stringent regulation, or replaced with public health announcements, are issues on which much has been written and continue to be controversial in the United States and in New Zealand. There is also a considerable literature surveying consumers and physicians perceptions of DTCA. ... 

Product marketing presents other ethical issues as well. In addition to direct product advertising in medical journals and direct to consumer advertising in the popular media, pharmaceutical company sales representatives frequently visit physicians. Although the... 

The outrage felt in some quarters by Pharma companies marketing direct to physicians had plenty of time to fester. According to GSK s own history, in 1919 Mahlon Kline began the novel practice of sending pharmaceutical samples through the mail to doctors across the United States. 

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