Medical profession plays a key role in making the fortunes of pharmaceutical companies. And the managers of pharma companies know this fact very well. It is not surprising, therefore, that the medical profession is regularly and systematically pampered by the pharmaceutical industry in all possible ways. With the senseless increase in the rate of product launches in most therapeutic categories, competition amongst the drug companies to please the practitioners has crossed all limits of propriety. Thus, one can see huge number of pharmaceutical products including a wide variety of irrational combinations with no therapeutic rationale in the market these days. The objective is just to push the sales and build up market share of the company. Unquestionable acceptance of such irrational and sometimes harmful products by the medical practitioners and the ineffectiveness of the regulatory authorities in stopping them embolden pharma companies to bring in more and more such products into the market. A control on launching of irrational products by pharmaceutical companies may not happen immediately under the current decentralized regulatory structure in which there is no proper scrutiny of therapeutic values of a product before the manufacturing license is issued. It is important that pharma companies need to make profits for their survival but at the same time they should not be agents to propagate irrational use of drugs.

While most medical practitioners become victims of enticement by pharma companies, a good number of them are not functioning effectively because of the inaccessibility of right information on time. For instance, a decision to ban or suspend sales of a drug by the authorities is not reaching doctors for months. In fact, such central orders are reaching the state drug controllers also quite late. One of the reasons for the free availability of banned drugs in the market is this communication gap between the DCGI and state drug controllers. The recent case is that of phenformin formulations. The product is still available in the market after its ban order issued on October 1. In the case of state drug controllers, DCGI order reaches at least belatedly. But, there is no system of communicating a ban or suspension order of a drug with medical community. Neither the State Medical Councils nor the Sate Medical Associations take any initiative in this regard. Kerala Drug Controller's decision to circulate all relevant government notifications relating to a ban or suspension of a drug amongst practicing doctors through state chapter of IMA, in this context, needs to be appreciated. If all the state drug controllers follow this practice, that would be a great service to patients of this country. A serious problem confronting the medical profession today is the lack of updating of their knowledge about existing and new drugs and their effects on patients. Kerala DC's initiative is just a first step in this direction.