A cynical consultation exercise?

The dismal proposals to allow pharmaceutical companies to promote prescription drugs directly to consumers have been orchestrated by the European Commission’s Directorate General for Enterprise and Industry (DGEI).¹

The DGEI’s main objective is to promote European trade and economic development, which presents grotesque conflicts of interest when it comes to shaping health policy. DGEI greatly overestimates the support the proposals deserve, no doubt partly in the expectation of strong backing from the industry-funded patient groups that it has traditionally promoted and preferred.

The consultation document lacks any coherent health impact assessment. It blurs the distinction between high and low quality information, and takes no account of the health impact of the far greater quantities of partial information to which people will now be exposed. That is a crucial omission.

The activities of the leading pharmaceutical companies mainly distract from the health problems we face. Though sometimes extremely valuable, drugs can only ever be a small part of the solution.

DGEI fails to appreciate that you paralyse the healthy human response once people come to believe that their genes, body chemistry, and social/cosmetic camouflage are key to developing health and wellbeing. These proposals absurdly take for granted the benefits of technological and medical intervention. Health is to do with eating sensibly and sufficiently, taking enough exercise, avoiding toxic exposures, and having social security and justice. Disease awareness propaganda distracts from these imperatives and makes the situation worse.

It is folly to promote drugs as if they were the bedrock of health development and the key to maintaining good enough personal confidence, social equilibrium, and mental and physical health. Medicalisation not only makes people feel resourceless and ill but also threatens the very existence of national health services by creating unsustainable demand.