Verifying Information About New Prescriptions or Medical Devices

In this Pharmaceutical Executive video interview, Jen Butler, Chief Commercial Officer for Pleio, discussed the significant threat of misinformation to public health, citing a 2021 report by former Surgeon General Murthy. She highlighted that 70% of false news is shared more often than true news due to its emotional appeal. Butler emphasized the importance of verifying health information by directly contacting trusted sources like Cleveland Clinic, Mayo Clinic, and Kaiser Permanente. She also noted the role of pharma in supporting patient communities and the need for media and health literacy. Butler also suggested that peer-to-patient platforms can enhance patient engagement and adherence, particularly for chronic conditions.

Can you share some insights on best practices about a new prescription or medical device?

The practice is again traditional and very basic, but I'll go into a little bit more explanation behind it is. But go to your trusted healthcare provider with a new medication and therapy and questions. That's absolutely the number one golden rule. But that's not always accessible to everybody, right? And your time with your healthcare provider is sometimes limited, but you just want to make sure that you're validating the new therapies, new approaches, beyond what you're hearing in whatever TikTok or AI generated content that you're reacting to.

I'll use GLP-1s as an example, because I think the recently, and what I didn't mention earlier in this is, GLP-1s is kind of that next surgence of massive misinformation. This amazing miracle drug that will have a huge impact on public health, but we have to make sure that the right patients are receiving the right diagnosis with the right medications. There's a lot of you know, I went on TikTok just to look at the fact there are over a dozen categories of GLP-1 discussions going on in videos and ways to find out information. There's also information out there that could be misleading regarding where to access GLP-1s and the compounding GLP-1 sites that you can now access the medications from and get it so far more easily, but not recognizing that there's false claims out there that these compounds are have FDA approval, and these are really important facts, again, versus the opinions of others that might be on these that need to be verified.

JAMA actually just published in January on their health forum a letter acknowledging that this is becoming a concern as well, with patients going through the compound sites, again, just being aware and educated as a patient, as you said before having kind of that consumer education approach as a patient. I mean, patients are people, consumers. We're consuming healthcare. We need to make sure that we're putting the right approaches in place. So, I mentioned JAMA. They're a great resource as well, tons of research. Health literacy might be a little bit elevated in some of the research that they put out there, but you can, at least get extracts and summaries as well of their research reports.