Healthy Skepticism Library item: 2782

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: media release

Working Together - A Guide to relationships between Health Consumer Organisations and Pharmaceutical Companies
Consumers Health Forum 2005 Nov 30
http://www.chf.org.au/Docs/Downloads/360_guide_for_relationships.pdf

Keywords:
CHF

Notes:

Ralph Faggotter’s Comments:

CHF is a government funded representative body for a number of consumer health organisations in Australia and ‘Medicines Australia’(MA) is what the peak organisation of the (largely trans-national) pharmaceutical companies in Australia calls itself.

This press release unashamedly lays bare the bones of the Faustian pacts which abound between community and consumer-based health organisations and the pharmaceutical industry.

In essence, the pharmaceutical company provides money, non-financial assistance and ‘educational material’ to the consumer health organisation ( usually disease-based such as diabetes, asthma, ADHD, depression etc) in exchange for the opportunity to expand the market for their drugs.

Consumer organisations which accept funding from pharmaceutical companies are frequently drawn into the web of deceit which is so clearly portrayed in this document.

The central goal of a pharmaceutical company is to increase corporate profits, not to provide objective educational services.
Indeed the two aims are mutually incompatable.

Any money which is given by a pharmaceutical company to CHF members is money well spent in this regard, because the consumer organisation can be relied upon to promote the following objectives on behalf of the company-
1/. promote the idea that the condition/disease in question is “more wide-spread than is generally realised”- resulting in some people taking drugs unnecessarily.
2/. that drug treatment is more valuable than is actually the case.
3/. de-emphasising alternative treatments such as non-drug therapies.
4/. down-playing the adverse impact of drug treatments.
5/. widening the market for the company’s drugs.
6/. disseminate pharmaceutical company dis-information ( also known as ‘educational pamphlets’).
7/. introduce their members to medical ‘opinon leaders’— i.e. doctors who are presented as independent experts but in reality are carefully selected and groomed by the companies for their pro-drug bias. Sometimes, unbeknown to the consumers, these doctors are paid substantial sums of money by the companies.
8/.Provide volunteer cases for the drug company’s Public Relations machine.
9/. promote the use of more expensive brand-name drugs when often other drugs would be cheaper or more appropriate.
10/. promote the use of new drugs which have often been inadequately tested.
11/. lobby on behalf of the drug company to influence the PBAC ( Pharmaceutical Benefits Advisory Committee) to approve drugs which have not been shown to be of greater benefit than avalaible drugs and which are usually more expensive and may have greater adverse effects.

As a result of these activities, the consumer organisation unwittingly becomes a proponent of the wider disese-mongering aims of the pharmaceutcal industry, resulting in a far greater proportion of the population consuming the company’s medications.

Ironically, this process may lead to a net deterioration in the health of the target population which the consumer health organisation represents, as evidence-based best practices are ignored in favour of the newer expensive patented medicines which have been rushed through approval processes without being adequately tested.

There is no such thing as a free lunch, and in the end, the consumer health organisation, blinded by the glitter of drug company gold, lets down its own constituency, in order to promote the interests of cunning corporations which it should be keeping at arms-length.

It is disgraceful that tax-payers’ money is being used to promote such anti-consumer activities through the CHF.

We would urge any member organisations of CHF to withdraw from receiving drug company funding and urge CHF to abandon it policy of promoting the interests of pharmaceutical companies at the expense of the health of the Australian public.

We acknowledge the difficulty that consumer health groups have in accessing adequate resources and call on government to increase funding for these groups so that they dont have to turn to the pharmaceutical industry.

For further discussion on the problems of consumer health organisations accepting funding from the pharmaceutical industry see-
http://www.whp-apsf.ca/en/documents/diff_prescrip.html and
http://www.whp-apsf.ca/pdf/corpFunding.pdf.

Full text:

see the Consumers Health Forum website – www.chf.org.au
or http://www.chf.org.au/Docs/Downloads/360_guide_for_relationships.pdf