One of the main, unwritten laws for the pharmaceutical industry is staggering, after a study revealed by Health-Information company Wolters Kluwer Health showed that more American patients are not buying prescribed drugs due to the economic recession.

The prescribed drugs industry used to be immune to the economy's ups and downs, but data revealed that due to higher prices, American patients have decided are not buying what they were prescribed by their doctors.According to Wolters patients are failing to fill in 6.8 percent of the of the brand-name prescriptions their doctors requested in the 2008 fourth quarter, a 22 percent increase from the first quarter of 2007.

Patients also abandoned prescriptions for generic drugs at a higher rate, failing to fill 4 percent of generic prescriptions.

In their study, Wolters Kluwer Health said that in the generic-drug prescription segment were increasing at an annual rate of 12 percent between 2004 and 2008, compared to while brand-drug prescriptions were falling at a 6.1 percent.Therefore prescriptions for generic drugs increased during 2008 to 2,400 million dollars (200 million dollars more than 2007) while prescriptions for brand-name drugs fell by 200 million dollars down to 1.400 million dollars.

Co-payments were increased during 2008, due to the fact that insurance companies needed more money to pay drugs for patients that could not pay for their prescriptions.

Mark Spiers from Pharma Solutions of Wolters Kluwer said that "If you talk to heads of pharmaceutical companies, I don't think they'd say they're immune from recessions right now,"