- Is there anything wrong with health care professionals being paid to provide information about their patients to marketers? Would it make an ethical difference if they received benefits for their hospitals or other patients rather than for themselves?
- Is it ethically acceptable to make money from other peoples’ desire to have their children be as healthy as possible? Why, or why not?
- Is there anything special about health care or could it be treated as a commodity like anything else that can be bought and sold in the market-place? Explain your reasoning.
APA format 250-350 words please.
The study of ethics provides us with a foundation to examine cases with diverse moral opinion and helps us decide what is ethical. This case study involves the practice of promoting infant formula over breast milk.
Read the case study here, “Advertising Ethics and Infant Formula” be sure to support your answers with fact from the case.
Case Study (taken from Ethics: Theory and Contemporary Issues)
“In Vietnam, baby formula is sometimes marketed so relentlessly that the companies selling the product circumvent or even ignore regulations that have been put in place to promote breastfeeding.
It is widely recognized that when it is possible for a mother to breast feed her baby, breast milk is the best choice for an infant’s health. However, there is a considerable body of evidence that formula companies in Vietnam utilize suspect or illegal practices to encourage mothers to give up breast feeding and use formula instead. The multinational companies have been accused of paying doctors and health care workers a commission on sales of their products, promoting formula for use with children under the age of twelve months, or marketing directly to mothers and health care workers at or near health care facilities. All of these actions are against Vietnamese law.
The following statistics show a definite change in how infants are fed in Vietnam over the last ten years:
- Companies selling infant formula spent $10 million on advertising in Vietnam in 2008, making the formula industry one of the top five advertisers in Vietnam.
- UNICEF has found that the number of mothers who breastfeed exclusively until their infants are six months old has decreased by half the last ten years to a current low of 17%.
- Formula sales increased 39% in 2008, according to a study by the market research firm, Nielsen.
The companies deny any wrong doing. They claim that they utilize only legal tactics in their sales and marketing practices. The point to the increase in the number of working women in Vietnam and say that factors like increased discretionary income and less time at home have led to increased demand for their products.
Aggressive marketing of formula takes place in many developing Asian countries. For example, the formula company Dutch Lady denied that they paid commissions to doctors to sell their product but admitted that they had provided certain goods (such as furniture) to a clinic to which included a large Dutch Lady logo prominently displayed in the waiting room. The director of this clinic, Tran Thi Hanh, said that the clinic had signed an agreement to promote products for pregnant women and nursing mothers, but not infant formula. There are no restrictions on selling powdered milk products for mothers and older children, and brands are often advertised in conjunction with these products; the advertising has been known to suggest that drinking these products will improve a child’s intelligence or strength, although there appears to be little or no evidence to support this claim.
While formula cannot be sold in Vietnamese hospitals, outside of the pharmacy, many brands of formula are sold and promoted legally in shops that are located near hospitals. Sales people are not allowed to approach mothers or health care professions, but there are allegations that this law is flouted and that company employees have used unethical practices to try to get patient names for direct contact. Other new mothers receive sales calls from company representatives, and suspect that their names have been passed on to them by their health care providers. The formula companies claim that they only contact women who have provided their contact information through promotions.”
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