"If you've googled "weight loss," there's a good chance that one of the first search results that came up was a website for Ozempic. But Ozempic hasn't been approved by the Food and Drug Administration for weight loss - it's only approved to treat Type 2 diabetes. So why is it showing up there? The answer is something called a sponsored search result. Companies pay search engines so that their"
""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"
"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. The idea is to prevent ads containing false or misleading material that can potentially hurt"
Search engines display Ozempic in top results for weight-loss queries because pharmaceutical companies pay for sponsored search placements. Pay-per-click ads allow drugmakers to prioritize their sites when users enter certain keywords. Traditional drug advertising rules require disclosure of risks and prohibit promotion for unapproved uses, but online sponsored search results are not regulated like TV or print ads, and legal frameworks lag behind technology. An analysis of two years of Novo Nordisk's paid Ozempic search ads found that 11 percent of paid keywords or phrases contained the word 'weigh'. These practices can produce potentially misleading exposure around non-approved weight-loss use.
Read at Georgia Public Broadcasting
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