Electronic dangers
The electronic age is having a practical effect on many areas of life. Letters to friends or business contacts on the other side of the planet no longer need a month on a boat or a day on a plane: they are delivered instantly with a click of a mouse by the power of email. Similarly, we only need to log onto our computers and there is a whole world of shopping out there. We only need to type in a credit card number, and the week's groceries, a new pile of reading matter or a slinky new outfit for the weekend are winging their way to the door.
It's only going to be a matter of time before the pharmaceutical industry has to consider seriously how it is going to exploit the electronic shopping revolution. As in much of the e-shopping market, the US is well ahead of the game, with e-pharmacists selling a wide range of drugs to anyone with a credit card. This is all very well, but drugs have much more potential to do bad as well as good than most other products one can buy on the internet. Typing the word 'Viagra' into Yahoo came up with matches with Pfizer, two information sites, two 'humour' sites and 15 companies offering the drug for sale. 'Order Viagra without having to go through stressful, embarrassing situations!' trumpets one of them. Fill in a medical questionnaire, give your credit card details, and the drug will drop through the letterbox in a brown paper package.
It may be avoiding 'stressful, embarrassing situations', but is it really in the best interests of the patient to be prescribed a drug that has potentially serious cardiovascular side-effects without any real check of their medical history?
But properly-controlled use of the internet for pharmaceutical distribution would be advantageous for both patient and prescriber. As Trevor Jones says on p19, 'It doesn't take a genius to see that a repeat prescription need not require you to keep going back to the pharmacist'. A doctor sending an electronic prescription to the pharmacist, who then delivers the drug directly to the patient, makes an enormous amount of sense. There is no reason why this should not be extended backwards to the prescription being fulfilled directly by the pharmaceutical company itself, cutting out the wholesaler and associated overheads.
Yet the pharmacist provides a vital link in the healthcare chain. Many patients don't want to bother their doctor with something they think trivial, but are happy to ask the pharmacist, who can then sell them the right medicine or point them in the direction of their doctor. Increasing use of telemedicine, with the development of on-line monitors and sensors, will lead to a change in the way many pharmaceutical products are delivered. But proper controls are essential, or there is the danger that unregulated access to drugs will mean a great increase in side-effects from patients taking the wrong medicine or combination of medicines. And this is bound to lead to negative publicity for the pharmaceutical industry.