A group of Australian doctors has pledged to ban pharmaceutical companies visiting their practices but the AMA says the campaign is misguided.
About 100 doctors have pledged to ban visits from pharmaceutical companies but the Australian Medical Association says the campaign is patronising and naive.
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A group of Australian doctors will launch the No Advertising Please (NAP) campaign at the Royal Australian College of General Practitioners annual conference in Adelaide on Saturday.
The campaign encourages GPs to ban drug companies from visiting their practices for a year, citing research linking the visits to the prescription of potentially inappropriate promoted medications.
About 100 doctors have already signed the pledge but AMA representative Brian Morton says the campaign is misguided and potentially damaging.
Doctors were capable of filtering advice from a range of sources, and meetings with pharmaceutical company representatives were a two-way process, Dr Morton said on Friday.
"I think it's very patronising," he told AAP.
"They're bringing the profession into disrepute by implying that we're naive.
"We take the rep on as to the honesty or the accuracy of their statements, and then compare them with what another rep has told us.
"It's not bland acceptance of what's been said to you, it's critical scrutiny of what they're marketing."
NAP spokesman Justin Coleman said doctors left themselves exposed to subtle marketing techniques when they allowed drug company representatives to visit their practices.
Doctors should instead seek out information about new drugs through independent sources of information such as the Australian Medicines Handbook, Dr Coleman said.
"You're making your brand as recognisable as possible in order to influence the choice of the doctor next time they come across it," he told AAP.
"(Doctors) can get all that information from numerous other sources in this online age very quickly."
Pharmaceutical industry group Medicines Australia enforces a code of conduct that prohibits companies from making false or misleading claims about their products.
Medicines Australia chairman Martin Cross said in a statement a campaign against pharmaceutical companies would leave patients at risk of poorer treatment options.
"The fact is, there is no one that knows more about a medicine than the company that has researched the medicine for over 12 years before it is approved to be prescribed by Australian GPs," he said.
