""Search engines are often the first place people go when they have health questions," says Daniel Eisenkraft Klein, a research fellow at the Program on Regulation, Therapeutics and Law at Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women's Hospital. "Pharmaceutical companies have figured out how to game that system with pay-per-click ads, which are essentially their way of buying their way to the top of search results," he added."
"Normally, drug companies have to follow strict rules when it comes to advertising their products in magazines or television commercials. They have to do things like disclose risks or side effects of the drug, and they can't advertise a drug to treat a condition it hasn't been FDA-approved to treat, even if doctors may sometimes prescribe that drug "off label," to treat other conditions. If they do, the companies can get in trouble with the FDA."
"But online sponsored search results, which usually appear on top of other results, aren't regulated the way TV ads. The law hasn't caught up to the changing technology. Eisenkraft Klein and his colleagues looked at two years of paid search results for Ozempic sponsored by the drug's maker, Novo Nordisk. They published their study results in the medical journal JAMA Network Open. They found that 11 percent of the search keywords or phrases the company paid for contained the word 'weight'"
Ozempic is approved by the FDA only to treat Type 2 diabetes but appears in weight-loss search results through paid search ads. Sponsored search results are paid placements that place company websites at the top for chosen keywords. Pharmaceutical companies use pay-per-click ads to target health-related queries, including weight-loss terms. Traditional drug advertising must disclose risks and cannot promote unapproved indications, but online sponsored search placements are less regulated. A study of two years of Novo Nordisk's paid search ads for Ozempic found 11 percent of paid keywords included the word 'weight'.
Read at WKU Public Radio | The Public Radio Service of Western Kentucky University
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