Prescription Drug Research and the Role of the Media
When mainstream media reports on drug research, reporters often leave out who funds the research, according to a new review.
This omission could distort consumer and doctor's views on the value of the given drugs—especially when the funding comes from the pharmaceutical industry.
Furthermore, the report finds that both the medical and mainstream media usually use brand names over generic names when referring to medications.
Some medical professionals are worried that this branding results in too much commercial interest being involved in the doctor-patient relationship, according to a recent article in U.S. News and World Report.
The Report's Findings
The report, published in the Oct. 1 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association, examined 306 news articles about medical research from U.S. newspapers and media Web sites. In addition, the study authors questioned 100 top newspaper editors about their medical reporting practices.
It was found that 42 percent of the news articles didn't state when drug research was funded by the pharmaceutical industry. When it was stated, the report found that it was often buried in the text.
When examining the media using specific brand names, 67 percent of the 277 articles only used the drug's brand name in at least half of the references to the medication.
In the United States, every year up to $9 billion is spent when doctors choose to prescribe name-brand drugs over equally qualified generic drugs, according to the study's authors and U.S. News and World Report.
The Concern: Defective Drugs
The cause for concern is that biased faulty drug research may lead to defective drugs and patient injury or even patient death.
"As a doctor, I am increasingly worried in recent years that company-funded research can't be trusted in the same way that other research can be trusted," study author Dr. Michael Hochman told the newspaper.
"News organizations, in my opinion, really should have explicit written policies that they enforce," Hochman continued. "We always need to disclose how a medical study is funded … We have many examples of how company-led research led us astray."
He specifically referred to the Vioxx (rofecoxib) debacle where the arthritis drug was pulled from shelves after concerns were raised about it damaging hearts and putting people at risk for heart troubles.
Newspaper Editors Object to Findings
The report's findings have been contested by newspaper editors who say reporters are trained to be unbiased deliverers of the news, said the newspaper article.
"Funding sources should be included in every story where it's relevant," Andrew Holtz, past president of the Association of Health Care Journalists and an independent journalist told the newspaper.
But Holtz continued to say that the study might be biased because it only analyzed news stories of at least 200 words.
"Two hundred words is not a very long story and I didn't see in the study anything about whether there was a correlation between length of article and how thorough the article was in mentioning funding and generic and brand names," Holtz told the paper.
Eighty-eight percent of the quizzed editors said they thought their published articles often or always mentioned company funding and 77 percent thought their stories referred to medications by their generic names.
Only three percent of the newspapers studied had formal policies regarding disclosure of company funding and just two percent had policies regarding the use of generic drug names, according to the news article.
Interestingly, peer-reviewed medical journals recently debated the issue and now many require that study authors disclose their funding sources.
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