Beware of Conflicts of Interest on the Web

Who is Giving Out Medical Advice?

Like you, all kinds of people are turning to the web more than ever before to find medical information. Do you know if you are getting true facts? Is the information slanted to get you to buy a drug? Is it really a sales pitch dressed up to look like wise medical advice?

When a medical website has a bias it means that there is a special interest (somebody is making money off of you). Special interests determine what is featured, influences who is hired to write articles and puts a spin on how they write about it. By actual count, over 90% of medical information websites have a significant bias. They are funded by companies selling drugs or medical devices.

People who are looking for straightforward information usually do not realize that what they are reading is influenced by drug company money.

The largest of these biased websites is WebMD®. You might have visited it. Its major funding comes from drug companies. The mother company, WebMD Health, has a Board of Directors consisting of distinguished businessmen, and all but one of them have past and/or ongoing director positions with drug companies, mail-order prescription drug supply houses, medical device companies and even cancer clinics and psychiatry clinics. The WebMD® website is colorfully plastered with ads from dozens of drug companies. The ads are strategically positioned to coordinate with the medical articles that push their drugs. The articles can be written by staff writers, contract writers, paid doctors and so-called opinion leaders. These hired doctors, often from universities, are paid to make statements which favor the sponsor’s products. The doctors that are asked to make return appearances are the ones who are really good at making the advertising line seem like their own opinion. This has led some people to call these doctors “pharma-whores”.

WebMD® runs several other information sites, making it look as if there is the same information coming from many different sources. Actually all of these are part of WebMD: RxList, WebMD Health, Medscape, MedicineNet, eMedicine, eMedicine Health, QualityHealth.com and theheart.org.

While WebMD Health is a big corporation traded on the stock exchange, the smaller site Drugs.com is owned and operated by the private Drugsite Trust, administered by two New Zealand pharmacists. That sounds so quaint and, well, trustworthy. But just like WebMD, the main revenue of Drugs.com comes from the sales of ad space to drug companies. No matter what, commercial sites that depend on drug companies for their very existence are not going to say anything that makes their sponsors look bad. Therefore you get all kinds of good news about drugs, and very little information on how poorly some drugs work and the serious side effects they have—things that are very important for you to know.

Another medical information website, Druginfonet.com, doesn’t even pretend to be unbiased. They do not write any of their own drug information content. They simply give you a link to the package inserts made up by the drug companies. Their site not only advertises drugs, they even advertise for jobs in the drug industry. If you want medical topic information, the Druginfonet.com website sends you to “HealthScout.com”. HealthScout.com reaches out to advertisers by promising so-called “Seamless Co-Branded Integration” – they promise to write up health news and information, to integrate directly into the corporate site, matching the drug companies’ website colors and themes. They aim to give the viewer the idea that he is looking at unbiased consumer information, but it’s all just part of selling the drug. It you want to get to frequently asked medical questions from Druginfonet.com, you get re-directed to a Proctor & Gamble website, a big drug maker, including drugs for osteoporosis, inflammatory bowel disease, bladder spasm and antibiotics.

ePOCRATES® is computer software for hand held devices and the web. It is loaded with drug company sponsored information for quick reference by doctors and anyone else.  It accepts advertising money from many companies, but its most prominent drug partner is Eli Lilly. Like WebMD, the same business model goes by many different names to target specific services, including DocAlert®, DocMemo®, MobileCME®, MultiCheck®, and PharmFlash®. They have perfected the art and science of joining up medical information with advertisers who want to influence what drugs patients are getting. They even pay 1,500 doctors to pitch a 20-slide presentation to sell the device to other doctors. Less than a fourth of their revenue comes for subscriptions. Most of their money comes from ad sales, marketing surveys and other companies that want to influence what prescriptions your doctor writes.

How can you tell if the website you are looking at may be influenced by drug companies? Drug ads are a sure tip-off! These can be banners, side bar ads or pop ups.  On one website your cursor dragged across the word cholesterol, for example, will cause an ad for Lipitor™ to pop up. Sometimes the website will directly credit the drug maker, such as on the Druginfonet.com website. Some ads are disguised as if they are themselves medical articles, such as an “article” about vaccinations for teenagers. If you click on it you are redirected to the website advertising the latest genital warts vaccine.

These websites are paid big money to say exactly what the drug company wants consumers and doctors to buy. When such ads are positioned alongside and within medical articles, it can look innocent, all the while strongly influencing the reader’s opinion of the drug. This is not really about giving you, the consumer, straight medical information. It’s about influencing your decision and the decision of your doctor. The bottom line is that the viewer is being worked over by heavily financed and creatively placed marketing campaigns on every single sponsored site on the internet. Don’t be fooled!