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How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

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Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#91

Post by Anarch157a »

Retric wrote: post #88
naturalauction wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patients and doctors need to know about a medicine to prescribe it. In order to increase brand awareness, drug companies can either advertise to or incentivize (free trips to conferences, consulting gigs) doctors to prescribe a drug or get patients to directly ask their doctor for a drug.

Few new drugs get invented each year and most are either slight modifications to existing drugs or highly specialized. Doctors can easily keep up with zero advertising needed. Drug companies advertise to convince doctors that drug X is better than it actually is. Which is obviously bad for patients who are better served by an objective approach to prescription drugs.

I wouldn't like to be severed by a drug. I prefer my body to stay in one piece, thank you.

But I agree that doctors don't need advertisement. Just publish a technical magazine 2 to 4 times a year with a technical description of the drugs available and let the doctors make the call.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#92

Post by cebert »

I can relate to this from my personal experience of having a sick family member. Five years ago, my father-in-law was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma, a rare blood cancer. I was close to him and joined several support and information pages on Facebook. Since doing that, I see ads on Facebook and elsewhere targeted to me as if I too had cancer. Now my father in law has passed, yet I still see ads that remind me of the horrible disease he battled.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#94

Post by ipython »

Retric wrote: post #83
mbg721 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For every "Big Tech figured out my diagnosis before I did" there are a thousand instances of "You just bought a fridge--I bet you love buying fridges, here, let me show you some".

People do take products back they don’t like. So statistically it’s not as unlikely as you might think.

More realistically you should tag the users profile to show them fridges in about 3 years when it first starts to either experience minor mechanical issues or starts to look “dated”. Just tag with refrigerator_2025 or something.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#95

Post by ju-st »

designium wrote: post #37
smcl wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you fill your date of birth on any age-protected content (websites for distilleries or breweries, for example) as 1st January 1940 or something? They could just mistakenly believe you're 81 based on that :)

But it could be similar to the case where Target was able to targets ads to women who did not even know they were pregnant. In this case, the above commenter could be doing things signaling that he may need a will soon due to diseases or life situation that he is not aware of. Or he/she has looked into content similar to those people in need. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

The target story is nice anecdote but it's unlikely that they figured out that the daughter is pregnant: https://medium.com/@colin.fraser/target-didnt-figure-out-a-t...

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#97

Post by moksly »

naturalauction wrote: post #80
moksly wrote: post #7

“If you’re a drug manufacturer looking for patients”. Maybe I’m just too Scandinavian to understand, but wouldn’t it be the other way around? Now I also wonder if I should see a doctor. I’ve been getting a lot of “is your will in order” commercials from law firms on Facebook recently. I sure hope big tech advertising doesn’t know something I don’t.

Patients and doctors need to know about a medicine to prescribe it. In order to increase brand awareness, drug companies can either advertise to or incentivize (free trips to conferences, consulting gigs) doctors to prescribe a drug or get patients to directly ask their doctor for a drug.

Do doctors prescribe brands in America? Here they’ll prescribe you with the working substance, and unless it’s still patented (which most of them aren’t) then you’ll just get offered the cheapest brand at the pharmacy by default.

I guess commercials would still work if you branded yourself hard enough, but our culture is more like the Velcro thing, where when people ask for a “panodil” or a “pinex” they don’t really care if it’s actually a panodil or a pinex as long as it’s a headache pill with that the same sort or working chemical.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#98

Post by yardie »

rich_sasha wrote: post #48
CapriciousCptl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the US, it's legal to advertise drugs directly to patients. There's not a lot of places in the world where it happens, I'm assuming Scandinavia is one of them.

One particularly funny side effect is that the narrator needs to read out a comprehensive disclaimer. I was once on holiday and with US TV, and saw a few times an ad for performance enhancement for older gentlemen. The ad showed an older couple, who first are not very happy, then much happier with each other, frollicking in the long grass and disappearing off shot etc. While that was happening, the narrator was readi…

It was a culture shock to me as an American that moved back to the US. Turned on regular TV only to see shows constantly interrupted by commercials. After that I put the STB in the closet and use streaming services.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#99

Post by danpalmer »

Uberphallus wrote: post #51
kalleboo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference is that Facebook says they specifically avoid sensitive health information https://www.facebook.com/business/help/361948878201809?id=18...

And nowhere in the article it's said that they use sensitive health information.

A distinction without a difference.

I suspect that this is how Facebook justify some of these things. They don't explicitly provide data, anything that advertisers choose to intuit from data is up to them. But I think this is a fundamental misunderstanding (or unwillingness to understand) privacy.

Privacy needs to be treated like a security concern. It basically is one. In security any place where more information is disclosed than intended is considered to be a security flaw in some sense. If there's a correlation between likes and health concerns that allows for statistical inferences about users health, that's a security flaw.

The thing about security like this is that it takes active work to solve these sorts of problems. Facebook are only doing the "passive" work of not giving advertisers the exact data. A counter example is Apple's "differential privacy" which does a lot more work to only preserve very specific tracking information and statistical properties.

Re: How pharmaceutical companies find sick users on Facebook

#100

Post by varispeed »

robbiep wrote: post #35
varispeed wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doctors get cash and hospitality benefits from big pharma though based on how they prescribe. If there is drug X from company Y and drug A from company B and then there is no difference in therapeutic benefits between two drugs, but company B gives doctor cash and has access to regional sales data where the doctor operates, they can modify the benefit based on sales. Then the doctor is incentivised to prescibe the A.…

This is absolutely not true in most countries. Where I practice you can get into big trouble for this. You have do declare pharma affiliations, cannot accept sponsorship and the age of junkets through drug companies is long in the past. I could be deregistered if I was found to be accepting anything (travel, hotels, conferences) and not declaring it

Great that your country stamped this out, but I am afraid you are the minority. Pharmaceutical industry is the most corrupt after politics and army and almost no doctor is immune to bad influence. Straight up denial is actually harmful in getting the truth out there and fixing the problem.
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