Stop the presses: media report badly on pharma - October 01, 2008
Posted on behalf of Ashley Yeager
What’s in a name and naming names? A lot — at least according to a review of the news media’s coverage of prescription drugs in the 1 October issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Basically, US news stories rarely report funding sources, and the media almost always refers to drugs by their brand name rather than their generic names (think Viagra versus sildenafil citrate), say Michael Hochman, of Cambridge Health Alliance in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and his colleagues. And, since news articles are a major source of medical information for many patients and even some physicians, that adds biases to the perception of pharmaceuticals, the team wrote.
“All of us, doctors, patients, journalists, have gotten into a bad habit of referring to medications by their proprietary brand names. At a philosophical level, I think we need to be referring to them by the generic name,” Hochman told Health Day News. And, he said, funding sources should always been named as company-funded research can't be trusted the same way as research from an independent source. “We want to keep commercial interests as much out of the doctor-patient relationship as possible,” he explained.
CBC.ca reports that giving brand names when a related generic name could be used may account for upwards of $9 billion in wasteful expenditures in the United States annually.
To look at the potential for media bias, Hochman and colleagues reviewed US news articles from newspaper and online sources about drug studies, to determine how often the stories reveal the funding source and how often medications are called by their brand vs. generic names. The researchers also questioned editors at the 100 most widely circulated newspapers in the US about whether they report company funding and give generic medication names.
Analysis showed that 130 of the 306 newspaper stories did not mention funding sources, and about 100 of 277 that mentioned drugs only used brand names. Of the 277 articles, 186 used a drug’s brand name on further reference. As for the news editors, the majority seemed to think their publications listed funding sources and generic names, but studies of articles coming from those particular publications showed that was not the case.
Still, the new study itself may be biased. It only analyzed stories of at least 200 words, as Andrew Holtz, past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists, told Health Day News. The stories could also be leaving out other important details such as side effects of particular drugs, he added.
Medpagetoday.com reports that the authors acknowledged there were limitations to the study. Still, Hochman says, news organizations “should have explicit written policies that they enforce” when covering the prescription drug industry.
He did admit that using generic drug names, which are often unpronounceable, even for experts, “will be an uphill battle.”
Comments
Those who design and create releases for the press, which is the print media, are designed to contain information of sufficient importance or interest to the public, historically speaking. This is what U.S. citizens are led to believe about what we may read.
Instead, those who design and release written information to the press are often sponsors of the print media who will issue the press release.
Such sponsors often instruct such media outlets with mandated authoritarian nuances such as the press release that they created will not be altered in any way by the print media that agrees to release the press created by the sponsor of the media outlet.
Of course, the sponsor and creator of such a press release create such written words in order to promote the sponsor’s company, as well as its products. By doing so, they are allowed the freedom to embellish if not fabricate what may be annotated on the release they issue to the press that has now been bought by them, the corporate sponsor.
Dan Abshear
Posted by: Dan | May 20, 2009 10:07 PM