EDITORIAL: Code barring pharmas from corrupting doctors overdue

The medical practitioners have as a result been avoiding prescribing medicines that are affordable to patients in favour of those made by their paymasters.
It would be expected that health professionals would behave in line with the Hippocratic Oath which commits them to protect the interests of patients at every opportunity.

The doctors have, however, done the exact opposite after benefiting from underhand payments, scholarships, grants, subsidies, consulting contracts as inducements to recommend purchasing, supplying or administering of products of particular drug makers.

The same doctors have been trying to avoid prescribing generic drugs that are cheaper and have similar medical properties in order to ensure that the pharmaceutical companies making the non-generic drugs have an upper hand when it comes to sales. That is highly unethical, to say the least.

It is good that several multinational companies have signed the code committing themselves to ethical practices in the business. What the authorities need to do is to follow up and see to it that it is really being implemented in practice.

One of the reasons why medical insurance is expensive has a lot to do with the prices of drugs.

Insurers have long felt that doctors have a tendency to go for the expensive treatments which inevitably come with higher bills for patients and therefore insurers have to pay up where the sick have a policy with them.

Apart from outright fraud, drugs are probably the other major reason that medical insurance has often been a loss-making business for underwriters, with many of them avoiding the business altogether.

Besides the drugs fraud, there is the other unethical practice of doctors recommending expensive treatment overseas for diseases that can be well handled in Kenya.