By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
Disputes are arising between doctors and pharmacists over who gets the right to prescribe medicines to patients.
While the pharmacists claim that the doctors should prescribe the main ingredients of a drug and they would give out the specific brand of medicines according to the direction, doctors claim designating drugs is the original right of medical staff.
The Korean Medical Association (KMA), the nation's largest group of doctors, recently revealed 576 generic drugs that have yet to be sufficiently proven to be equally effective as originals.
``Without the exact reliability of the drugs being proven, the pharmacists' giving out the drugs on their own cannot ensure that patients' health and doctors' directives are being properly addressed. Moreover, it could threaten people's rights to health,'' KMA president Choo Soo-ho said.
Prescription rights have long been a hot potato in the medical field because it involves large amounts of money and shows who has the real power in the medical field.
In 2006, the Roh Moo-hyun administration ruled that since pharmacies cannot afford to stock all brands doctors prescribe, as long as pharmacists have full knowledge of generic drugs used as substitutes for originals, replacement of drugs with similar effects should be allowed. Thereby patients would have easier access to generic drugs, which are relatively more affordable.
During the Korea Food and Drug Administration (KFDA)'s investigation into how original medicines compared with their generic counterparts, it was revealed that some companies allegedly tried to manipulate results to pass examinations.
Pharmacists said the 576 medicines on the list failed in the similarity test, but this didn't necessarily mean the drugs were unreliable. In fact the KFDA assumed about 90 percent of the drugs to be safe and similar enough.
Pharmacists also claimed that many of the medicines were doctors' favorites, and so their claims of safety and side-effects were meaningless. The Seoul Pharmaceutical Association said, ``One of the enlisted, `Simbast' from Hanmi Pharmaceutical, marks more than 10 billion won in sales a year through doctors' prescriptions. If it is not safe, then why are they giving it to patients?''
KMA itself has admitted that about 90 percent of the 576 generic drugs are safe, meaning that it is likely the list of drugs was revealed in an attempt to block prescription rights being handed to pharmacists.