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Ethical Issues in Pharmaceutical Prescriptions

Sat, September 7, 1:00 to 2:30pm, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel, Floor: Four, Gallier A

Abstract

The use of psychopharmaceuticals has spread to the point of becoming the main tool of medical and psychiatric treatments in the mental health field. But the prescription and discontinuation of pharmaceutical treatments arise medical ethics issues. Doctors have to make clinical decisions taking into account multiple elements: scientific and technical knowledge, his own clinical experience, decisions made by colleagues, opinions from other health professionals and from the patients. Moreover, this process occurs in the context of health policies and the particular health services where they work, producing tensions between the ideal conception of a good treatment and that one that is achievable. This complex situation frequently leads to ethical crossroads where doctors have to choose between alternative clinical decisions.
These medical decisions make the clinical practice difficult to adjust to the supposedly required objectivity that would be necessary to apply the so-called rational use of medications, making impossible to follow the a priori constructed guidelines in which the medical community puts their hopes of a good use of these controversial technologies.
Drawing on data from three qualitative research projects on the use of psychotropic drugs in the medical clinical practice in Uruguay, we discuss how general practitioners and psychiatrists address the ethical issues that surround the prescription of benzodiazepines and antidepressants, two controversial psychotropic drugs.
Being psychologists and university teachers, our research in the field of medicine prescription also account for a clinical and ethical position of not underestimating what has an impact on the subjectivity of our patients.

Authors