The pharmaceuticals industry must stop trying to influence doctors, patients, researchers and the general public, the government’s health advisory group RVZ said in a new report on Tuesday, according to the NRC.

And there must be more transparency to prevent potential conflicts of interest. If self-regulation does not work, there should be new legislation to curb the industry’s activities, the NRC quotes the RVZ as saying.
The pharmaceuticals industry sometimes goes too far in influencing academic research and researchers should always state if they have been paid by the industry, the report says.
In addition, drugs manufacturers also influence patients’ organisations by sponsoring them, and sometimes demand that their product is given priority. Here too there must be more transparency.
Society’s needs
Drugs firms also come under attack for not producing the medicines which society needs. They are also too focused on their company’s interests rather than society at large, the report says.
‘The pharmaceutical industry is not helped by the fact that it spends more money on marketing than it does on research and development,’ the NRC quoted the report as saying.
Instead pharmaceutical companies should focus on developing cost-effective treatments which offer real added value, the RVZ suggests.