Doctors say high cost of drugs not their fault

• Source: Global Times
• [10:35 June 29 2010]
• Comments

Patients purchase medicine at the No.1 Pharmacy on Wuding Road in Jing'an district. Photo: Cai Xianmin

By Zhou Ping

As complaints from patients rise over the soaring costs of medicine in the city, medical professionals charge that pharmaceutical companies are to blame for the problem.

Medical professionals say that they have no role to play in the matter after Jiefang Daily Monday highlighted the cost disadvantages that patients incur when seeking drugs prescribed by doctors.

For instance, the report said that erythrocin lactobionate, the injection form of erythrocin, an antibiotic used to treat bacterial infections, which costs up to 1.6 yuan ($0.24) per 0.25 grams, cannot be found on drug store shelves around the city.

"The manufacturers of this drug have stopped producing it for over a year now," a woman who works at the drug department of Xinhua Hospital, affiliated with Jiaotong University's School of Medicine, and who declined to disclose her identity, told the Global Times Monday. "You can take an injection of azithromycin as a substitute, but it costs more."

According to medical experts, relatively inexpensive drugs are disappearing as pharmaceutical companies unnecessarily upgrade medicines as a way to enlarge profit margins.

Zhu Xiaobo, director of Shanghai Pudong Charity Hospital, said that pharmaceutical companies have even taken to repackaging cheaper medicines, giving them a new look as a means to charge more for the same drugs.

"It has become harder to buy cheap medicines that were commonly available in the past," he told the Global Times Monday. "Our doctors sometimes prefer to use medicines that have been around for ages, and are comparatively cheaper, but they are increasingly being forced to prescribe new, expensive drugs since they seem to own the market these days."

Zhu said that new medicines do not always work better than ones that have been tried and tested over the years.

"Take penicillin for example," he said. "It is becoming harder to find, yet, excluding those who are allergic to the drug, it has the least side effect for most patients compared to other substitutes."

Zhu added that stricter government control in the arena is needed to give patients more affordable choices.

"Since drug manufacturers essentially synthesize the ingredients of drugs, the government can price all ingredients by deciding on a standard cost for each," he said. "This way, patients will only need to compare the ingredients listed on the packages when deciding which brands to buy."

Meanwhile, pharmaceutical companies like Shanghai Sine Wanxiang Pharmaceutical Company, which produces over 180 types of drugs for domestic and international distribution, admitted that new medicines impact the production of old drugs, but said that they have no reason to stop manufacturing old ones so long as the market demand for them exists.

A man from the administrative office of Shanghai Sine Wanxiang Pharmaceutical Company, who declined to disclose his identity, said that the shift to more expensive drugs on the market is somewhat owed to medical professionals.

"The demand for cheaper medicines have shrunk partly because doctors prefer to prescribe more expensive medicines," he told the Global Times Monday.