Information to Consumers

A true picture of benefit and risk?

Since pharmaceutical companies are not allowed to directly advertise prescription-only medicines to consumers in the EU, their attempts to promote their products have had to become more subtle. Companies are involved in various patient information initiatives, often developed in cooperation with governments and health organisations.

The companies' aim seems to be to persuade people that certain types of disease are more common than people think and that these diseases are best tackled by the use of medicines. Patients and consumers are more likely to believe information which governments or health organisations endorse.

HAI Europe believes that pharmaceutical companies real intent is to maximise the sales of its products and that they cannot therefore be relied upon to provide objective information about the benefits and risks of medicines.

It is very important for consumers to know who is involved in providing patient information and also to know of the relationships of influence between industry and government ministers and officials and between industry and some patients groups.

The other side to the distortion of information available to patients and consumers is the repression of information which gives a negative impression of a medicine. This includes the difficulty in seeing published both clinical trial data, often on the grounds of 'commercial confidentiality', and reports of patients' adverse reactions to medicines. One example is when GlaxoSmithKline's trials for the anti-depressant Seroxat showed no statistically significant advantage over placebo, the company decided it needed a strategy "to effectively manage the dissemination of these data in order to minimise any potential negative commercial impact".