Poor-quality and counterfeit drugs: what should patients know?
As everyone knows, patients in Azerbaijan have gotten used to a certain phrase: “brand-name drugs.” Unfortunately, many doctors prescribe these so-called brand-name drugs and take a percentage from them. And I can say with pride that no one — no company representative — can say that Dr. Rufat took a percentage on such-and-such a drug, or anything of the sort, and prescribed their drug.
Because when representatives of many companies came to my office — they used to come at one time, they no longer do — I would ask them to sit down: “Have a seat. Let’s see whether your drug even exists.”
And in many cases I proved things they themselves weren’t aware of, because as representatives they simply present the drug. But they have no information at all about it. I showed them on Google and asked, “Which company manufactures your drug?”
“A company in Spain.” Then you look up that Spanish company, and not only does it sometimes turn out that the company doesn’t exist — sometimes it even turns out that the company doesn’t manufacture urological drugs. There have been many such cases, and those representatives no longer knock on my office door, no longer come, no longer approach me.
Very often I pay attention to the quality of drugs and their effect, based on my experience. For example, tamsulosin is a drug specific to my field, and drugs containing tamsulosin in Azerbaijan are in many cases ineffective — whether I should put that down to faulty manufacturing or call them fakes. There is, for example, one company, an Austrian company, with a product called Tamozin.
I wrote to that company and contacted them. And they told me that they have a distributor in Azerbaijan and that I can prescribe it with confidence. They even sent me a photo of the box.
What I mean is that I research these drugs and look at their results, even with ordinary ibuprofen. For example, I once prescribed ibuprofen to a patient, and it had no effect at all. It is a painkiller that also relieves inflammation. I told him, “Go and buy it from a German pharmacy.”
He went and bought it, and two days later he said, “Doctor, it’s a completely different result.” Unfortunately, this problem exists in Azerbaijan, and the authorities need to deal with it — seriously. Because this is about the health of our people, our citizens, and when people buy poor-quality drugs, those drugs have no effect and can even cause their death.
I can even speak from my own personal experience: I had never been allergic to aspirin. I bought aspirin from a particular company, took it when I had a headache, and it gave me acute anaphylactic shock. In other words, if I hadn’t been a doctor and hadn’t understood what was happening, my outcome could have been different too.
We applied the appropriate treatment, and it resolved. But imagine this happening to a patient, with no doctor at home, and a delay — it could result in the patient’s death. In such a situation our state authorities must deal with this issue and ban the sale of improper, fake drugs.
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