Pharmaceutical Marketing - Essay Example

To this effect, the companies have come under great scrutiny and they have been viewed as negatively affecting the entire medical fraternity. However, many people do not see the connection between the pharmaceutical marketing and the negative effects it has on the professionals and the patients as well (Higgins, 39). Pharmaceutical marketing is the business activity of advertising and promoting the sales of drugs or pharmaceuticals. Although many people are opposed to the fact that marketing of pharmaceutical products affects the physicians and the patients, there is evidence that the practice is harmful to both the medical professionals and the patients and it is in this effect that many countries around the world have put up some legislation that seek to limit the activity.

This is because the pharmaceutical marketing strategies that the industry has embarked on have put both the physicians and the patients at a dilemma with many drug companies competing to lure the physicians and the patients into using their products. . This is because the physicians are the most important people to the industry and this can be attributed to the fact the physicians are the people who are involved in prescribing medicines to the patients. It is in this effect that the industries concentrated on the physicians as the targets of their advertising and this meant that the industry would send many of their representatives to the medical facilities and also use other avenues to reach the physicians.

One of the avenues that the industry employed was the utilization of medical conferences whereby a company would be the host. This was a very effective form of advertising but with time, it became obsolete and the industry had to come with new methods of marketing (Higgins, 39). This precipitated the direct advertising to the consumer. This has been viewed as very destructive because even the physicians sometimes cannot convince a patient on the prescription drugs that are best for a particular condition.

This means that the patients have some information about some drugs and this has put even the relationship between the patient and the physician in jeopardy. This has been seen as one of the negative effect of the pharmaceutical industry advertising directly to the consumers (Polen, 39). There is controversy related to pharmaceutical advertisement and various quarters are opposed to the increased advertisement while others view this as a better way of informing the consumers. Those opposed argue that advertisements have adversely and negatively affected patients as well as physicians.

It has been cited that these advertisements does not list the side effects of the drugs to the patients and also conceal some very important information pertaining to a particular drug (Parker,