Medical ethics has long been a vexed issue – during the COVID-19 pandemic, even the government asked questions about high hospital bills.The case against the marketing of the paracetamol Dolo has once again brought this issue in the limelight, since there are allegations against the manufacturer of spending aggressively to woo doctors into prescribing the drug, which the company denies.Dr Sanjay Nagral, a surgeon and columnist, who is on the editorial board of the Indian Journal of Medical Ethics has written a lot on the subject. In this podcast discussion with Sidharth Bhatia, he emphasises the need for enforcing these these ethics. “We have followed the American model of privatisation of medical care, but the US has strong regulation, which includes punishment too,” he says.He says pharma companies invite doctors to fully paid conferences and woo them in many ways to prescribe only their drugs. Hospitals, who buy these drugs at a discount, then insist that in-house patients buy only from them, thereby getting a huge profit. “Incentivisation of doctors has gone up and has been normalised”, he says.