Detecting and Reporting Deceptive Prescription Drug Promotion: Differences Across Consumer and Physician Audiences and by Number and Type of Deceptive Claims and Tactics

ABSTRACT

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s (FDA) Bad Ad program provides an avenue for healthcare providers to report false or misleading prescription drug promotion. Yet, whether healthcare providers can detect such promotion, and whether they believe it should be reported to FDA, remain open questions. Consumer audiences may also be capable of detecting such promotion and believe it should be reported, but even less is known about capability and belief in this population. Across two experiments using mock pharmaceutical websites, this research investigated capability to detect and inclination to report deceptive prescription drug promotion among a sample of primary care physicians and consumers. Study 1 varied the number of deceptive claims and tactics on a website for a chronic pain medication, operationalized as none, two, or five. Study 2 varied the type of deceptive content on a website for a weight loss medication, operationalized as none, implicit, or explicit. Findings reveal that, in line with expectations from FDA’s Bad Ad program, physicians can detect deceptive promotion and tend to believe it should be reported. Consumers are also capable of detecting deceptive promotion and tend to believe it should be reported, but their capabilities and beliefs regarding reporting are generally lower.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Note that because the stimuli that consumers and PCPs viewed included slight differences, we refrained from making statistical comparisons between consumers and PCPs for Hypotheses 1–4. Nevertheless, we consider observed patterns qualitatively in the Discussion section.

2. We report the ƞ² for the overall effects and planned comparisons based on the standard F test even though the homogeneity of variances assumption was violated; ƞ² should be viewed as an approximation.

Additional information

Funding

Funding was provided by the Office of Prescription Drug Promotion, Center for Drug Evaluation and Research, U.S. Food and Drug Administration [HHSF223201510002B/HHSF22315002]. The research presented in this article was granted an exemption by FDA’s Institutional Review Board and was reviewed by RTI International’s Institutional Review Board.