Dilemma in Marketing of Medical/Pharmaceutical Products

Dilemma in Marketing of Medical/Pharmaceutical Products
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Dilemma in Marketing of Medical/Pharmaceutical Products
Pharmaceutical industry is very essential to human as it plays the biggest role in managing human health. However, despite of their efforts in playing their role there are some ethical problems that hinders their effectiveness while serving the consumers and it has led to great concern from the consumers and the medical fraternity in general (Duff, 2010).
The marketing practices in pharmaceutical industry has become an ethical dilemma because the strategies used in doing the marketing negatively affect the practitioners ethics thus having a negative outcome to the consumers. It is evident that pharmaceutical industry spends a lot of money to advertise their products and even gives free samples of the drugs to the consumers which influences consumers in buying the product. Some marketers goes to an extent of giving the practitioners incentives after selling their products and this affects their practice while doing the prescription as they tend to prescribe or advice the consumers in the favor of their interests and not with the interest of the consumer. The practitioner lacks honesty while serving the consumer and it results to consumers losing their trust with them (Grace & Stephen, 2005).
The repercussions to these dilemmas is by making sure that all involved persons in the industry adhere to responsible marketing strategies that abides the medical code of ethics. The marketers should remove the incentives that they give to practitioners and instead provide adequate information to all the medical practitioners regarding their products so as to put them in a better position of prescribing it to the benefit of the consumers. The information should also be given to consumers to help them in...