Healthy Skepticism Library item: 19312

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: Journal Article

Masoni M, Guelfi MR, Gensini GF
Online healthcare advertising needs regulation
BMJ 2011 Mar 3; 342:
http://www.bmj.com/content/342/bmj.c5778.extract

Abstract:

The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) requested that drug firms end “misleading” and “misbranded” advertising on Google and other search engines in several warning letters in 2009. Its routine monitoring and surveillance found that advertisements often did not include risk information. 1 Our investigations also found that sponsored links sometimes lead to web pages that contain worrying medical claims, 2 or to pages that contain no information relevant to the search terms.

Online advertising is attractive to healthcare companies. Search advertising, where advertisements related to search terms appear at the top of the results page, is one of the few successful internet based business models. Google, the most popular internet search engine, earns much of its revenue from AdWords, software used by …