Pharmaceutical companies spend billions marketing their products to healthcare professionals every year. The practice influences how doctors and pharmacists prescribe and dispense medicines. Pharmaceutical marketing is also fuelling antibiotic resistance. The industry is promoting overuse and misuse of antibiotics for human and animal use—even offering financial incentives to prescribers and dispensers. This is dramatically reducing the effectiveness of antibiotics and rapidly increasing the global threat of antibiotic resistance.

Health Action International presses governments to enact and enforce laws that stop pharmaceutical marketing and implement standard treatment guidelines for medicines. We also teach healthcare students and professionals about the dangerous impact that pharmaceutical marketing has on their prescribing and dispensing practices and strategies to use independent sources of information on medicines.

Guides for Understanding to Pharmaceutical Marketing

Pharmaceutical marketing leads to less-than-optimal treatment for patients and increases healthcare costs. We’re teaching healthcare professionals how to understand and respond to it.

Webinars for Medical Students and Healthcare Professional

How does pharmaceutical marketing affect prescribing and dispensing decisions? Our workshops and webinars aim to answer this question and more.

Quiz for Medical Students and Healthcare Professionals

Test your knowledge of marketing practices within the pharmaceutical industry by completing our quiz about pharmaceutical promotion.

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Answering your frequently asked questions

We’ve created a series of short videos answering the questions we frequently get asked about pharmaceutical promotion. We’ve invited experts, including some HAI staff members, to submit videos where they answer a key question on pharmaceutical marketing in just a couple of minutes.