The CHOICE report, Unfair gym contracts, offers some advice on your consumer rights when you embark on your gym journey, including a cancellation form letter that should make breaking up with your gym a little bit easier.

What to watch out for:

• Don’t succumb to high-pressure sales tactics.
  Take time to shop around and carefully consider the memberships on offer at each gym.
• Rights and responsibilities.
  Read your contract carefully and be fully aware of your rights and responsibilities. Don’t be afraid to question anything in the contract that you don’t like and/or understand.
• Check the cancellation terms of the contract.
  Can you get out of it if you move house, get sick, lose your job or simply decide to give up? Don’t assume the contract finishes at the end of 12 months. Check your contract to see how to cancel your membership (and direct debit) if you no longer want to attend.
• Don’t assume your direct debit will be cancelled when you cancel your gym membership.
  If you have any doubts, contact your bank directly and request an immediate cancellation of the direct debit. Although, if you have any outstanding debt you will need to arrange to pay this by cash or cheque.

If you have a gym membership story to tell, we’re keen to hear it. You can leave a comment here or in the Your Say section of the report.

Now, when you wish to submit a comment, you will also fill out a sequence of letters. It’s a simple task for humans that can’t easily be replicated by a computer so it helps prevent automated ‘bots’ from clogging up the blogosphere.

For more information on CAPTCHAs, check out the article on CHOICE Online.

An excerpt from Big Bucks Big Pharma, a documentary directed by Ronit Ridberg that was screened at the CI World Congress. A fascinating look at the marketing of drugs, both directly to consumers and to the medical industry, and the enormous influence it can have.

This statement, from former Merck sale rep Gene Carbona, provides some insight: “No matter where you spend money in pharmaceutical promotion…you make money. And my boss always told me: “Don’t worry about it; there will always be more funding. Spend what you can. In fact, if I give you $100,000 to spend, Gene, I want you to spend $200,000.”

Check out the website www.bigbucksbigpharma.org for more information.

• Name and shame ‘bribed’ doctors – Melbourne Herald Sun, Australia
• Drug firms try to bribe doctors with cars – Guardian Unlimited, UK
• Drug companies attacked over gifts for Third World doctors – Independent, UK
• Calls for “bribed” doctors to be blacklisted – LIVENEWS.com.au, Australia

CHOICE Congress page – links to all available content
The Consumers International YouTube page – video interviews with speakers and delegates
The slideshare.net congress page – powerpoint presentations
The Consumers International web site – links to most content.

More content is being uploaded as soon as it is available.

We will try to obtain any missing presentations and papers as soon as possible.

Cheers, the CHOICE Vod Pod Blog team.

Everytime we receive a drug prescription from our doctors, we trust that they have our best interest at heart. But how would we feel if we realise they have been showered with gifts by the companies that are selling the drugs to us?

One Indian doctor told Consumers International the following:

“On sale of 1000 samples of the drug, get a Motorola handset.
On sale of 5000 samples, get an air cooler.
On sale of 10,000 samples, get a motor bike.”

The ethics of drug promotion remains a controversial topic in consumer debates. While certain types of medicine have an important role for specific treatments, critics argue that companies are increasingly engaging in “disease promotion”.

Ray Moynihan, journalist and author of Selling Sickness, said pharmaceutical companies have always struggled to maintain balance between serving the public and the maximising sales.

“The common ground between public interest and profit maximisation can sometimes be a tiny island surrounded by a sea of conflicts.”

Risk factors are being turned into diseases and healthy people are turned into patients, Mr Moynihan said. He gave the examples of osteoporosis, social anxiety disorder and female sexual dysfunction as classic cases of disease mongering by pharmaceutical companies.

Patient groups are also being influenced by drug companies as they become more reliant on the multi-million industry for funding.

Information provision or marketing stunt?

In the case of social anxiety disorder, Glaxo Smith Kline hired PR company Cohn & Wolf to “cultivate a marketplace” before launching antidepressant Paxil. In the guise of educating the public, the company aimed to boost the sale of Paxil by warning that one in eight Americans suffers from the disease.

The industry’s perspective

Dr Harvey Bale from the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers & Association (IFPMA) said the industry has developed a code to encourage ethical drug promotion.

The IFPMA is compulsory for members and require that promotion be tied to scientific evidence and facts. Dr Bale argues that drug promotion creates an awareness of particular diseases and treatment options and helps direct patients to appropriate treatments.

“Promotion must not, however, become a tool that causes doctors to deviate from prescribing the best medicine for patients,” Dr Bale added.

Brazil’s experience

Professor Jose Barros highlighted how much the commercialisation of drugs has affected people’s lives.

“Now we can take a pill to solve any type of problem – even to change our lifestyles.”

Pharmaceutical giants have created an appetite for medication to treat chronic conditions like obesity and ADHD in Brazil. Professor Barros said the sale of Ritalin (treatment for ADHD) increased 54 percent from 2003 to 2004, far outgrowing the rate of the condition itself.

For information on CHOICE’s campaign on unethical drug marketing see our article ‘Drug Advertising’.

We’ve got reports on some of Monday’s fringe events. Georgina has given us the first of two accounts of the day-long campaigning event on advocacy for consumers’ intellectual property rights and Candice has given her impressions of the food marketing fringe event. There’s also a brief account of the event promoting a World Consumers’ Energy Charter.

Georgina tracked down some of the many articles in the global media associated with Congress events.

And there’s a preview of Wednesday’s session on the ethics of drug marketing.

The vodcast team (Ella, Suzy and Tracy) have created six short videos including interviews with Congress speakers and delegates and an item about the food marketing media event held Monday morning. These videos and much more are available on the CHOICE Congress web report created by Katie.

What do you think? Please comment on any blog entry you see fit!

On Wednesday morning congress will get a chance to discuss the ethics of drug marketing with a panel including representatives from the drug industry, journalism and academia.

Dr Harvey Bale is the director of the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association and will be representing the industry view. IFPMA recently revised its marketing code however at the launch consumer organisations were already criticising it for not going far enough.

Ray Moynihan is a leading Australian health writer and wrote ‘Selling sickness, how the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are turning us all into patients.’ It goes without saying that he is a strong critic of the industry.

Dr Jose Barros is a professor at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora’s school of medicine in Brazil and is an expert on the determinants and consequences of drug use. See his powerpoint presentation on the CI World Congress slideshare site here (in Spanish).

It promises to be a lively debate that will help to inform and inspire people on an issue that is a key campaign issue for Consumers International and has long been a concern for consumer organisations around the world.

Cooper’s work – which will be displayed at Congress – is designed to call to task the unethical marketing and advertising tactics of the pharmaceutical industry. It consists of a package of material including TV ads, print ads, billboards, pill sculptures, merchandise and the HAVIDOL website.

To view one of the TV ads click here. Ms Cooper will also address the Congress, outlining why she undertook this project and its impact.

Presenter details
Justine Cooper, the creator of HAVIDOL, typically investigates the intersections between culture, science and medicine, moving between animation, video, web, installation, photography and medical imaging technologies such as MRI, DNA sequencing and Ultrasound. Her artwork has been internationally reviewed and exhibited. Most recently at the Asia-Pacific Triennial, Ars Electronica and Eyebeam, along with The New Museum, New York; The NTT InterCommunication Center, Tokyo; The Singapore Museum of Art; The Netherlands Institute for Media Art, The George Pompidou Centre, Paris; Kwang Ju Biennale, Korea, and the International Center of Photography, New York.

Her artwork is held in public and private collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Powerhouse Museum (Sydney), The Queensland Art Gallery and the Australian Center for the Moving Image. She was the recipient of an Australia Council Fellowship a 2-year, once in a lifetime prize awarded to an artist of outstanding artistic achievement and potential.

The theme of the congress is Holding Corporations to Account. Consumer demands for corporate accountability, transparency and responsibility have never been so pressing: whether it’s unethical marketing, sustainable consumption, credit and debt, or what we eat — consumers are losing trust in companies and are calling for change.

More than 300 delegates from around the world will hear from a range of internationally renowned experts and take part in key policy debates and workshops.

The programme focuses on the need for corporate accountability within CI’s key campaign areas:

• Unethical drug promotion
• Sustainable consumption
• Food marketing and obesity
• Consumer credit and debt

What: 18th Consumers International World Congress
When: 29 October to 1 November 2007
Where: Luna Park, Sydney