Physicians who posted endorsements of drugs on social media often received cash payments from industry, and in some cases didn’t disclose that they had been compensated, a team of researchers found in a new research letter.
In the letter, published in the Journal of the American Medical Association on Thursday, a team of researchers examined how physicians endorse products on social media and are compensated by manufacturers.
The team looked specifically at instances where physicians endorsed a product for marketing purposes, excluding cases where physicians were solely expressing a positive opinion of a certain product without being compensated.
Evaluating physicians’ posts on X (formerly known as Twitter) over the course of 2022, the research team found that most physicians, 26 out of the 28 total who posted endorsements on social media for marketing purposes, received cash payments from the manufacturer of the endorsed product. Further, the team found that only about half of the endorsements were from physicians who had relevant research experience in the area.
The paper noted that the sample size of 28 was relatively small, and they evaluated just one social media platform. The researchers also noted that there was some uncertainty regarding whether payments were specifically linked to the endorsement.
Aaron MitchellAaron Mitchell, an oncologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who authored the research, said in an interview with Endpoints News that while the majority of the physicians they studied disclosed that they had received payments from a company, a substantial portion did not.
He said that not disclosing the payments goes against the American Medical Association’s standards for physicians’ interactions with industry.
Mitchell said that moving forward, he’d like to see regulators start to require that physicians clearly distinguish the type of content they’re posting when it’s for paid endorsements.
For example, he said if a drug is still in development, there could be a more scientific role for the physician to play by posting about the drug, compared to a product that’s already approved and ready to be marketed.
“There’s very much a scientific role that we have that often leads us to endorse drugs or say that they should be used,” he said. “But then I think that’s very different from then entering into some kind of financial obligation or contractual obligation to endorse a product.”