Medical Principles and Healthcare Needs - Essay Example

According to the policy on vendor relationships, medical practitioners should base all their decisions on the integrity of medical research, analysis, and professional judgments. Their professionalism should not be affected by their relationship with vendors in the medical field.  Such inducements have been found to influence decisions by medical practitioners.

After a thorough medical examination, healthcare practitioners, for example, doctors should be in a position to prescribe the proper medicine to a patient. According to Wazana (2000), physicians should base their decisions only on the patient’s health condition and prescribe appropriate medicine whether it is from an inducing pharmaceutical company or not. This is because their role is to save patients’ lives and not to promote products from pharmaceutical companies. They should not allow anyone else to affect their decisions regarding medical procedures or drug prescriptions.

Unfortunately, in some cases, it has been noted that some medical practitioner does not base their prescriptions on the patient’s health needs. They prescribe medicine in favor of some pharmaceutical companies that give them inducements in the form of gifts, sponsorship in graduate education or Continued Medical Education (CME), and food. These gifts influence the prescription patterns of the physicians even to the risk to the patient’s health. This has turned their role from medical practitioners into ‘salespeople’ for pharmaceutical companies (Wazana, 2000).

It has affected the standard of drugs, and medical devices and equipment ordered by medical practitioners for use in their medical practice hence compromising the standard of medical care offered to patients. The quality of some drug samples and therapeutic devices has not been proven by the pharmacy and therapeutics committee. This means that a lot of lives are in danger, especially patients whose medical conditions require a medicine from a company that is not offering inducements (Wazana, 2000). Medical practitioners may ask such patients to use medicine that is too weak or too strong to deal with the patient’s health issue as long as they are brands from the rewarding companies.

Many of the vendor relationships between medical practitioners and pharmaceutical companies have worked to the disadvantage of society. This has caused a lack of trust and confidence in physicians. It even becomes worse if the vice comes to the public domain. The vice of ‘influenced prescriptions’ has to be stopped. Value for human life and society’s trust in medical practitioners should be restored. Campaigns against inducements from pharmaceutical companies should be discouraged so as to end the vice and save lives. We should join hands with Standford, Yale, and Pennsylvania Universities which decided to ban sponsorships and gifts offered by pharmaceutical companies. All pharmacy departments must monitor the administration of drug samples.