Letter

Should we keep should we keep taking the tablets?

Dear healthmatters — I am a new subscriber. The other ‘NHS mag’ I read regularly is the Health Service Journal – in which hardly a week goes by without the topics of prescribing and the use of medicines appearing.

I note your laudable principles include being non-political, and accepting no backing from health-exploitation industries. Yet I find the tone of some of your articles illustrates a mindset of taking a political (small ‘p’) stance. Implicitly the pharmaceutical industry seems to be a ‘wicked’ industry and yet surely we are not advocating throwing away all our Aids, antibiotic and angina medicines. Your language and use of words like ‘drug’ companies (i.e. drugs are bad) evoke a strong sense of distaste with an important contributor to the health of the economy.

We continue the paradigm of people talking at each other and not with each other. Isn’t it time that the various stakeholders interested in the appropriate use of medicines try to understand each other’s point of view and debate the issues in an informed, evidence-based fashion? Having spent the last 20 years working in the pharmaceutical industry, it frustrates me that baggage on both ‘sides’ gets in the way of real dialogue.

So how can we get an informed dialogue going given the seemingly entrenched positions of the main stakeholders?