Patient-Centered Care or Drug-Centered Care: The Influence of Pharmaceutical Marketing on Medical Science and Public Health

Abstract

Medical leaders today call increasingly for patient-centered care, which is often contrasted with doctor-centered care and disease-centered care. One threat to patient-centered care which does not easily fit into these categories, however, is what one might label drug-centered care. Drug-centered “care” arises when pharmaceutical industry marketing exerts a deleterious influence over both the medical profession and the general public. This influence is easy to detect when it assumes blatant forms such as financial incentives to overprescribe but is harder to perceive when it takes the form of changing the way we think about disease and indeed about human life. Two case studies that illustrate this deleterious influence are antidepressant drugs and drugs for type 2 diabetes. The inverse benefit law explains why these forms of pharmaceutical marketing constitute a threat to the public’s health.