Blog 1: Ethics

Desperate to loose weight, some women choose to use diet drugs or “weight loss pills”, frequently coming across illegal drugs with harmful and banned ingredients that forgoes medical testings (1). Mediator, an amphetamine-derivative drug, is now believed to have taken the lives of thousands who wanted to lose weight and stands in the eye of one of France’s worst pharmaceutical scandals.

It came to recent attention that Pierre Dukan, a retired french doctor was ‘censured by France’s national medical body for failing to observe medical ethics in prescribing(2)’ diet drugs and has killed hundreds of people by damaging their heart valves. It is not illegal to  prescribe diet pills however, Dukan, was sanctioned for prescribing Mediator for long periods of time, with a sole purpose of personal promotion without ‘exercising enough care in his proposals. (2)’

There is no question that prescription and diet drugs are businesses, however, when doctors start ‘practising medicine “like a business” (2)’ we question whether medicine is to benefit the patients or the doctors and pill salesmen. The society turns to doctors to fix or ameliorate medical conditions but with doctors becoming more focused on personal businesses, who is there to trust? It doesn’t matter if doctors try to promote personal businesses as long as they stick to their ethical code of conduct and put the people’s health before their own profits.

Work Cited

(1) http://www.mirror.co.uk/lifestyle/health/diet-pills-danger-surge-women-2060938

(2) http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/09/pierre-dukan-france-mediator-prescription