Prescription For Money: Do You Trust Your Doctor?

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drug prescriptionSome of us who visit the surgery for drug prescriptions tend to get upset with the doctor if we leave the surgery without such prescriptions. We expect the GP to make prescription for us to deal with our illness. We believe that the doctor knows the best about our health and any prescription we get from the doctor is in our best interest. We can hardly contemplate that doctors can make prescriptions against our interest.

After hearing the allegation of prescription for money involving one of the leading British drug makers, Glaxo Smith Kline (GSK), you may reconsider this perception about doctor’s drug prescriptions. According to a former Polish sales representative, Jarek Wisniewiski, GSK paid some doctors to conduct lectures and promote the usefulness of certain GSK drugs to the public. The whistle blower also claimed that the company paid doctors for prescribing certain drugs over others. It is difficult to imagine whether the doctors involved in these unethical and criminal behaviour thought about the side effects of those drugs they were prescribing to patients unnecessarily.

This is not the first that GSK has been accused of paying doctors to prescribe drugs unnecessarily. In the past the company was accused of paying doctors in both China and Iraq to prescribe drugs that patients did not need. These allegations however were not taken very seriously by people in the west partly because the countries where these crimes were alleged to have been committed have no sound drug regulation records.

Why should allegation involving drug prescription be taken very seriously? All drugs have side effects. Some of these side effects can be very serious and can result in other health complications later for the patient. Therefore, prescribing drugs with the potential to cause very serious side effects to patients who do not need the drugs is not only against the Hippocratic Oath but it also cruel and inhumane.

Prescribing drugs unnecessarily is also costly both to the state and individuals. The state pays millions of pounds annually for drug prescriptions for patients who cannot afford the health cost. Individuals who are not entitled to free prescription also spend a huge amount of their income on prescription drugs. Any company or individual found to be increasing this cost should be punished appropriately.

Now the British anti-bribery body has launched an investigation into this allegation of inappropriate drug prescription by GSK. Under the British anti-bribery law, it is an offence to bribe a foreign official in return for business. There is severe punishment for any company found guilty of this crime, and officials of such company can also face criminal prosecutions.

While we may know about the fate of GSK if it is found guilty of this crime, we may never know about the fate of individuals who have received the wrong prescriptions. The present investigation can only protect the public against similar frauds in future. What a shame to thousands of people who may have been the victims of this scammed!

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