I found this card in our outpatient clinic, inserted under the glass that covers the table top. One of the Pharmaceuticals has been using these cards for promotion of their products. The sales representative gives a card to the doctor and requests him to prescribe his product. The name of the product to be prescribed is printed on the back of the card. What the marketing people of the company do not seem to have realized is that a doctor is expected to prescribe a drug because a patient needs it, and he prescribes a particular one made by a particular company because it is of good quality and priced economically. It must never be prescribed to make the sales representative feel grateful for it. I do not like that ‘I’ in the request … it connotes a personal relationship, where the doctor is obliges the sales person by prescribing his product, which sounds unethical. If the sales person is going to reciprocate the obligation in some way, it is even worse.
(Note: I have covered parts of the faces of individuals shown in the photograph to protect their identities, which are anyway unknown to me.)
