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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 17508

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: news

PhRMA Statement About Accessing Online Health Information
Pharma Live 2010 Mar 9
http://pharmalive.com/news/index.cfm?articleID=690437


Full text:

Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA) Senior Vice President David E. Wheadon issued the following statement regarding patients’ access to reliable health information online:
“PhRMA member companies are committed to providing patients and healthcare professionals with truthful and scientifically accurate information about the life-saving and life-enhancing medicines they research, develop and manufacture. To that end, PhRMA is proposing that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) issue new guidance detailing how biopharmaceutical research companies may use social media to help patients and to improve public health; the guidance eventually could be adopted as regulations.

Click here to view the associated table “PhRMA and its member companies remain committed to working constructively with the FDA to help develop these Internet-specific standards.

“As was clear from the FDA’s recent two-day public meeting on this topic, millions of patients and healthcare professionals turn to social networks, blogs and other social media tools to gather health information and to share their experiences with other Internet users. Given the unprecedented growth of the Internet as a source of health information, the FDA should facilitate the appropriate use of online media by America’s pharmaceutical research and biotechnology companies to provide FDA-regulated information on medicines.

“At a time when more than half of adults first turn to the Internet to find health information, the extraordinary volume of dangerous and inaccurate information about medicines on the Web makes the FDA’s leadership on this topic all the more essential. What’s more, the Agency should avoid chilling manufacturers’ responsible communication about their medical products and should permit them to take full advantage of the same technologies that the FDA and the White House use – including blogs, video, search and such social networking sites as Twitterâ„¢ – to communicate important health information directly to patients and their doctors.

“As outlined in our detailed comments to the FDA, PhRMA seeks:

“Universal symbol. The FDA should adopt a prominent universal symbol to indicate a direct link to FDA-regulated risk information online. While certain technologies and increasingly popular platforms – such as handheld devices – emphasize brevity, more information can be provided by hyperlink or other technologies, like rollover. The use of the FDA’s own logo or other FDA-approved symbol would shine a brighter spotlight on official Web sites of FDA-approved medical products containing reliable and comprehensive information about medicines’ benefits and risks.

“Introductory warning information. The FDA should allow manufacturers to present brief introductions to health information in electronic formats, just as the FDA now does in its own tweets. Postings in space-constrained media, such as sponsored search results, would include a standard universal warning that would be approved by the FDA, such as: ‘All drugs have risks. Click here for more information from the manufacturer.’ The link would take consumers directly to comprehensive risk and benefit information.

“Responsible microblogging of newsworthy regulatory events. FDA has set a laudable example in its own use of Twitter to broadcast newsworthy events, such as new product approvals. Given space constraints and consistent with FDA’s own use of such media, the Agency should allow biopharmaceutical manufacturers to serve as responsible stewards of newsworthy information about their products and should permit manufacturers to microblog about significant scientific and regulatory events. Importantly, FDA regulations allow for the exchange of scientific information that is neither advertising nor promotion. Such exchange of scientific ideas can and should continue online.

“PhRMA hopes that all of the proposals contained in our 16-page submission to the FDA help to inform the Agency’s guidance on how to best communicate the benefits and risks of medicines in new, online media.

“Already, biopharmaceutical companies provide the only FDA-regulated promotional information about medicines online.”

Listen to an audiocast of today’s call

Follow the Twitter conversation at www.twitter.com/fdasm

Read PhRMA Comments to FDA

View the social media slides

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909