«Family doctors do not deserve treatment like this. With everything they've done over the years." There is disappointment in the words with which Saffi Giustini, manager of the Pharmaceutical area of Simg, consultant reg. Tuscany and Aifa, returns to the transmission of the "Hyenas" and to the accusations of "pro-branded" comparison launched by one of their latest services.
Giustini, why this malice towards that service? Didn't you like the generic accusations?
The "attachments" that subliminally accompanied the report annoy me: well, do you see that family doctors are unreliable? They're good at best to take care of a bit of bureaucracy, we'll leave the prescription of drugs to other doctors. It is a message which, I am sorry to say, the interview with Garattini has indirectly strengthened instead of refuting it.
In what sense?
The concept passes that if I write "non-replaceable" on the prescription I'm not independent, I'm the victim of the sirens of a certain medical-scientific information.
And instead?
And instead I would gladly invite the Hyenas and Professor Garattini to spend a day in my group medicine in the province of Pistoia: they would see that if I write "non-replaceable" on a generic statin, it is because the patient to whom the prescription is addressed took five different brands of the same molecule in one year. They would see how much the complex variability of situations that distinguishes general practice affects our prescriptive choices.
I understand, but the rules must be respected…
And in fact, if in the last twenty-five years the drug system has held up without sinking the NHS it is thanks to general medicine: apart from a physiological and negligible percentage of black sheep, the category has complied with notes and rules. Those who insist on off-label or insist on branded prescribing are not family doctors, but other prescribers. Well known to the Regions, moreover.
I understand: the culprits are elsewhere but you pay for the old commonplace of the "unreliable" MMG on your skin...
Exact. And then, this service of the Hyenas comes at a very delicate moment for the Mg, with the reform of primary care still the subject of long debates in the Ministry and family doctors in search of definitive emancipation with a directing role in the health of the
