UF College of Journalism and Communications

Medicine-ads study surprises researchers

Paula Rausch, MAMC 2006, will seek funding from pharmaceutical firms to continue researching direct-to-consumer health advertising.

By Rachael Cox

After researching direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA), doctoral student Paula Rausch, MAMC 2006, changed her perspective.

Once skeptical, she now believes DTCA can improve patients’ health literacy.

“[DTCA] can have some really positive benefits because it combines the really effective techniques of advertising with health messages that people obviously have interest in receiving,” she said. “And it does it so effectively that people are going to their health-care provider and they’re asking about specific medications.”

Rausch and Debbie Treise, associate dean of Graduate Studies and an advertising professor, interviewed 11 nurse practitioners for the study.

“People really are learning a lot of stuff from these ads,” Treise said. “That’s what nurse practitioners believed, as well.”

The nurses had mixed feelings toward DTCA, partly because advertisers often ignore them as health-care providers, telling consumers to contact their doctor, Treise said.

“[Nurses] are becoming mainstream health-care providers,” the study notes. “Not only in an effort to help curb the nation’s ballooning health-care costs, but also to fill a need as fewer physicians and medical students are opting for family practice.”

“Nurses are the ones who are writing most of the prescriptions now,” Treise said.

Although the nurses in the study saw value in boosting patients’ health literacy through ads, they expressed concern that patients believe only medication can deliver a cure.

Some patients go as far as insisting nurses prescribe them the advertised drugs even when the nurses recommended other medications.

Treise and Rausch’s study, “The Prescription Pill Paradox: Nurse Practitioners’ Perceptions About Direct-to-Consumer Advertising,” appeared last year in the Journal of Pharmaceutical Marketing & Management.

Although Treise and Rausch, who have been research partners since 2004, received no funding for this research, they plan to seek funding from pharmaceutical companies to continue studying DTCA, Treise said.

“I’m just fascinated by this whole topic,” she said. “There’s a lot of literature out there that says people are really, really health illiterate, and I think direct-to-consumer advertising raises health literacy.”