The topic of this thesis was how well the Pharma Industry Finland Code of Ethics is realized in pre-scription medicine advertisements. The aim of this thesis was to study prescription medicine adver-tisements in volume 2012 of the Finnish Medical Journal. The focus is on diabetes and anticoagu-lants advertisements and these were chosen as therapy areas because type 2 diabetes is a very common disease in Finland, and because anticoagulants are used to treat other various diseases that are also common in Finland. The client of this thesis is a marketing firm Design Valkea PLC which is experienced in marketing in the medical field. The client gave the topic for this thesis.

The method of the study was based on qualitative methods because of the nature of the thesis. The main materials for the study were the prescription medicine advertisements in Finnish Medical Jour-nal, and the study was made by observing whether those advertisements were in accordance with the Code of Ethics or not. The most important sources of information were legislation, the Pharma Industry Finland Code of Ethics, and the Finnish Medical Journal volume 2012.

The primary results of this thesis were that mainly the codes of ethics were realized in prescription medicine advertisements. However the use of summary of product characteristics (SPC) as the ref-erences in advertisements was considerably common. This might be quite an interesting topic for further studies. Another topic could be how advertisements in medical journals affect doctors’ choices of prescribing medicines.