Drug vis‐à‐vis consumer: a retrospection

Purpose – Drugs and pharmaceuticals assume importance in the healthcare system today for their capacity to replace costly treatments like surgery. The pharmaceutical industry is considered capital intensive and building a new product costs as much as $900 million. Though the cost of developing a new product is significantly low in a country like India, it is substantial. Therefore, perhaps, companies try to go for incremental innovation. This apart, finding new symptoms to promote products, hiding major side effects, publishing data mixing the outcomes of different studies, publishing major outcomes in reputed journals and poor outcome studies in less important journals are some of the strategies being adopted by pharmaceutical companies. The purpose of this paper is to analyze these issues and their impacts on the Indian economy. As most of the Indian pharmaceutical companies are in private hands, this paper focuses on the possible plight of Indian poor in the changing world order. Design/methodology/approach – This paper draws upon earlier research undertaken by the author. His experience from the pharmaceutical industry as well as the published works of other researchers also helped complete the work. Findings – The analysis of this paper indicates that in order to avoid the loss of revenue and to keep their businesses floating, drug and pharmaceutical companies resort to information manipulation. Research limitations/implications – The research is limited to the author's ability to review literatures in the field of marketing and corporate ethics related to drugs and pharmaceuticals. As competition and economic liberalization would have a significant impact on pharmaceutical brand‐success, therefore, perhaps, drug companies would resort to manipulations for survival. This paper is an attempt to alert the society to these sorts of information laundering. Practical implications – This paper would perhaps provide consumers with necessary information to understand the unethical practices being adopted by drug companies and help them consider what exactly to look for and would press for their right to good health. Originality/value – This paper is the record of original work done by the author. It would probably fulfil an identified need and would perhaps help the society fight unethical practices being adopted by pharmaceutical companies.