Gender and racial bias in drug promotional material distributed by pharmaceutical companies

Pharmaceutical industries promote their drugs with the intention to influence the prescription decision of health care provider / physicians and adopt various methods like distribution drug promotional materials to the health care provider, publishing drug advertisements in medical journals, personal visits to the health care provider/physicians by designated representatives and sponsoring conferences/CMEs (continuous medical education). Sometime this may influence the health care provider/physician and may lead to the wrong or inappropriate choice of medications, which is an issue of immense ethical concern and also can compromise with the treatment protocol. Quality of these promotional materials are always under scanner and many studies done for drug advertisements published in Indian and western journals show that many of the advertisements provides insufficient, incorrect and biased information.[1-3] One major issue that emerged was biased nature of pictures and images in drug promotional materials distributed to physicians in hospitals and clinics. In a study done by Hawkins et al., it was observed that most of the doctors shown in advertisements were men and most of the consumers were women. Men were more often shown as worker and when women were showing working, it was usually feminine jobs like waitress and secretaries.[4] Ideally drug advertisements should have pictures according to racial and ethnic composition of people of that country, should have equal numbers of male and females, and females should be portrayed in similar ways as male.[5] There is scarcity of similar documentation to establish if such biases on drug promotional material distributed by pharmaceutical companies do occur in India. Present study is designed with the an overall aim of appraising the drug promotional materials distributed by pharmaceutical companies, to document presence of racial and gender bias, if any.