Study Says Advertising Influences Drug Recommendatins

Some medical journals are free to doctors and are paid for with advertising. Others have no advertising and are paid for entirely with subscriptions.

What’s that got to do with you, you ask? Maybe a lot, if you depend on objective advice from your doctor about what drugs you should be taking.

Research published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal makes a case that a medical journal’s revenue source can affect drug recommendations. Free journals by and large positively recommend specific drugs while journals funded solely by subscriptions usually recommend against the use of the drugs.

Depending on the type of journal your doctor reads might influence whether she is likely to prescribe a drug.

"Our study shows that the tendency to positively recommend the use of a drug depends on the source of a journal's funding," writes Dr. Annette Becker, University of Marburg, Marburg, Germany, with coauthors.

She says free journals almost exclusively endorse the use of the selected drugs, whereas journals that rely exclusively on subscription fees for their revenue are more likely to recommend against the use of the same drugs.

A survey of Canadian doctors found that they were unlikely to consider journals that did not undergo a peer review process (typically those journals sent to them free of charge) as credible sources of information. However, more than half of the doctors surveyed said they had used free journals as a source of information during the previous month.

Physicians need to be aware of these biases when using medical education materials in free medical publications, the authors conclude.

Corporate influence on educational medical journals is a relatively unexplored topic. Previous studies have focused on mass market drug advertising, even though consumers cannot purchase the drug without a doctor’s prescription.