Drug Company Websites

I was doing a little reading tonight and went through a couple studies looking at the websites of pharmaceutical companies. The studies were:

• Griffiths, K. M., Christensen, H., & Evans, K. (2002). Pharmaceutical Company Websites as Sources of Information for Consumers: How Appropriate and Informative Are They? . Disease Management and Health Outcomes, 10(4), 205-214.

• Graber, M. A., & Weckmann, M. (2002). Pharmaceutical Company Internet Sites As Sources of Information About Antidepressant Medications. CNS Drugs, 16(6), 419-423.
  

The first thing I thought upon reading these studies is that some of the methods/results of Internet-oriented studies don't necessarily have the longest shelf life. In one of them they used HotBot.com as a tool for searching the Internet, which I'm pretty sure at this point would be fairly unlikely for most healthcare consumers.

In any case, I think the question about the educational value of pharmaceutical company websites is an interesting one. I have a PhD student who recently collected data looking at what people learn (hopefully) from the Gardasil website, we're just starting to dig into the data right now to see what people thought of the website, what they might have learned from it, etc.

I've never fully grasped when I read research articles on drug advertising when the authors take a combative stance. (I'm not saying either of these articles do that, but I've certainly seen enough of it.) This isn't to say that I necessarily think drug advertising doesn't have some problems, but it seems like good academic research could help improve the quality of drug advertisements. If the end result are better (whatever that might mean) ads that lead to better patient education and compliance, it would seem like everyone wins... Patients learn about their health, drugs to treat health conditions they might have, they're more compliant (aka, increased sales for the companies), and they end up managing their health more successfully.

Anyway, there might not be a real point to this post, just a few random things that came to mind when I was doing a little reading tonight. Here's hoping academics and industry can do a slightly better job working together to improve these ads for the betterment of everyone involved.