Britain becoming "pill for every ill" society

A report by the influential Commons Select Committee on Health, criticises the drugs industry for promoting the wider use of medication in a bid to increase its profits, and says Britain is being turned into "pill for every ill" society by the multibillion-pound drugs industry, which encourages patients to take medication even for "unhappiness".

The MPs are calling for stricter controls on the promotion of new drugs until known side-effects are established and place much of the blame on GP's for over prescribing anti-depressants. The extensive review into the UK's booming drugs industry found that the increased use of medicines to treat every problem in society was a major and recurring issue.

They suggest that before too long the indications are that everybody in Britain would be taking a pill every day for something or other, with those over 55 being prescribed statins to stop heart attacks, and anti-depressants being over-prescribed. They state that unhappiness is part of the spectrum of human experience, not a medical condition, but there is a strong and growing tendency to believe that life's problems are best dealt with as medical conditions.

Committee chairman Labour MP David Hinchliffe, a former social worker, says that people have come to rely on the optimistic 'get well' messages from commercial and professional sources rather than face reality, and the drugs industry had encouraged that trend with its £1.65bn marketing and promotion budget, compared to only £4.5m spent by the Department of Health.

He fears that the industry has nurtured anxieties about ill-health driven by pressure from its investors and the influence of its marketing force and advertising agencies, rather than its scientists.

The increased promotion of drugs could make unsustainable demands on the NHS, and confuse the picture of how good health is maintained and a failure to ensure preventive public health measures were at the forefront of health policy.

The MPs believe that the aggressive promotion of medicines shortly after launch, the sheer volume of information that is received by prescribers and the 'promotional hospitality masquerading as education' all contribute to the inappropriate prescription of medicines.

The MPs concluded that self-regulation by the industry does not work and breaches of advertising regulations occur, negative medicines information is concealed and prescribers are given misleading information.

The practice under which respected academics lend their names to reports on drugs by "ghost writers" without ever seeing the raw data on which the reports were based should be stopped.

They also criticised the influence the drugs industry has over GPs, patients, academics, the media and even the institutions meant to regulate it, including Parliament.