There is something endearingly old-fashioned about the FDA’s draft guidance on the use of social media. The intention is to provide welcome direction on ways to present risk benefit information in a medium that plays a growing role in healthcare decisions worldwide.
For some reason, the FDA’s use of its usual precise language when describing things like - messages on Twitter or “tweets” makes me think of the time my Mother’s TV stopped working because she thought there was “something wrong with the digital.”
Semantics aside, it is certainly a challenge to communicate the complex risk:benefit equation in a medium that is limited to 140 characters. The FDA gives a fictitious example of how it could be achieved -
“NoFocus (rememberine HCl) for mild to moderate memory loss; may cause seizures in patients with a seizure disorder www.nofocus.com/risk”
This isn’t a marketer’s dream but is less alarming than the sponsored link example they provide -
Just how bad are these headaches?
The problem is that the character limit is absolute. Once you have fitted in the required warnings, there may be relatively little space left for the benefits and certainly no way for the lay person to get a sense of the genuine likelihood of them receiving a net benefit from taking the drug.
Of course, the US is one of only two countries in which prescription drugs can be legally marketed directly at the public (the other being New Zealand). By their very nature, the benefits and risks of OTC drugs will usually be a lot clearer and so the messages less potentially alarming.
Maybe I’m hopelessly old fashioned in thinking that there are some things you just can’t effectively communicate with a character limit (Haiku poets may disagree) but I do wonder about the wisdom of basing any healthcare decision on a medium designed for the rapid dissemination of snapshots of information, like Twitter.
|
|
 |
|
|
Share on LinkedIn |
Share via Email |
