Legal and Ethical Considerations in Marketing, Product Safety, and Essay

Legal and Ethical Considerations in Marketing, Product Safety, and Intellectual Property - Essay Example This is sound ethical behavior, even if such reporting will result in severe financial loss to the company. All of the issues and more are covered in this case study. It is important to consider the reality of direct-to-consumer (DTC) marketing by consumer and its potential impact. This paper will analyze such issues in the context of PharmaCARE, while also exploring intellectual property considerations and U.S. law. The backdrop to this dialogue will be a strong consideration of the ethical obligations that a company like PharmaCARE has to the global community. Direct to Consumer Marketing and Drug Companies Simply put, direct to consumer marketing involves the promotion of a product in mainstream media. The intent is to promote the product by appealing the potential consumer directly. The term is actually most commonly applied to the pharmaceutical industry, which makes it worthy of discussion in this case. Drug companies that engage in direct to consumer marketing bypass health pr ofessionals and attempt to reach the patient directly. The Federal Food and Drug Administration regulate such advertising, yet many professionals claim that the oversight is quite lax and ineffective. There are several concerns with this method of advertising that applies particularly in the case of PharmaCARE. It should be noted that the most common methods of direct to consumer marketing include television advertising, print, radio, and now social media outlets. With the lack of adequate oversight, questions of an ethical nature are frequently asked when considering whether or not drug companies should use such a marketing strategy. Advertising companies are not health professionals. They do not diagnose patients and they cannot adequately determine if the side effects of any given drug may be counterproductive for the consumer. While pharmaceutical companies are required by law to indicate potential side effects of the drug being marketing, and they are only permitted to tout pro ven benefits of the medicine, such disclaimers are often not clear to the consumer. This can lead individual patients to try and self-diagnose their own illnesses, and then approach their own physician about getting a particular drug prescribed to them. This leads us to yet another ethical dilemma. If an advertising campaign for a new drug floods the airwaves, physicians may become inundated with requests to prescribe the drug to their patients. This puts the physician in an awkward position. They may end up overprescribing the drug, doing so without themselves actually researching the drug and feeling comfortable in its use. This creates the ethical question of whether drug companies should even be permitted to engage this practice at all. The argument is that they should only allowed to promote their products directly to health care professions, who can then decide which drugs best suit their particular patients. The practice of direct to consumer pharmaceutical advertising (DTCPA ) has so many ethical implications that most countries have an outright ban on the practice. Only the United States and New Zealand permit its broad use. This is the reason that PharmaCARE has been permitted to engage in the practice. To be fair, not at all pharmaceutical companies market their drugs directly to the consumer. It seems to be