Spin your science into gold: direct to consumer marketing within social media platforms

David Egilman, Nicholas M. Druar
2012 Work : A journal of Prevention, Assesment and rehabilitation  
We describe the emerging issues related to warnings with respect to pharmaceutical company use of the internet as a vehicle for direct-to-consumer marketing (DTC) and market research. We describe the various techniques pharmaceutical companies have used to exploit this new communications medium which permits two way exchange of information. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has not issued any specific regulations to control internet based misbranding. We describe some examples of the FDA's
more » ... application of historic regulations to pharmaceutical company use of this new medium and suggest Keywords: direct-to-consumer, web 2.0, pharmaceutical, social media 1 Marketing slogan from To identify examples of fraudulent direct to consumer marketing we used 4 major sources of information: scientific literature, gray literature, PubMed and the Food and Drug Administration website. We used to search the scientific literature using key search terms including, internet, social media, direct to consumer, DTC, and pharmaceutical direct to consumer. We used the search engine Google to identify other articles including news articles, government reports, magazine articles, and advocacy group websites. [34] More than ten million results were obtained through these searches and we reviewed the first three hundred. These searches were done in the summer of 2011.
doi:10.3233/wor-2012-0751-4494 fatcat:puvsb2muf5d53i3buhzcqf2vba