Raging against the medical-research PR machine
We all know that press releases about promising medical research can be as much about commercial hype as realistic hope. Not long ago, a specialty physician expressed reluctance to me to blog about the so-called “cancer vaccine,” now in a limited clinical trial.
“There are so many hurdles for this drug to clear that it’s unlikely that these treatments will ever hit the market,” he said. “Why get people’s hopes up? I agreed that he was half right. Why, indeed, lead cancer patients down a primrose path to a dead-end of disappointment?
The half-wrong part, however, is that his point is actually an argument FOR physicians to blog about these kinds of public proclamations of medical breakthroughs. Let me put it in this context: right after the cancer-vaccine news broke last month, if you did a Google search for “Provenge,” the commercial name for the drug, you’d get approximately a half-million results.
Inserting some sense into online chatter
That’s right, at least a half-million Web pages had some information about Provenge specifically. Two months, we’d bet it was not even five percent of that. The search results are overt evidence that masses of people are already talking about a cancer vaccine and looking for more related information on the Internet.
If you’re a physician in private practice – especially in the specialty of urology and oncology – you can either be in on their searches and related public conversations, or out of it altogether.
In the latter case we’d say you’re inviting physicians in competing practices to take the opportunity away from you.
By no means do people – especially cancer patients – want deception about their diseases. Yes, they want hope and to believe in the best possible outcomes for their treatments. But most of all, they want an authoritative source they can trust.
That would be doctors. Second only to cures for their diseases, what patients want desperately is useful, actionable information.
Such information – in various forms of usefulness and accuracy – is already all over the Internet. Is your voice of reason and truth part of the online cornucopia of knowledge?
About Vanguard Communications
Since 1994, Vanguard Communications has provided specialty healthcare marketing with a strategy focused on patient education guaranteed to bring new patients to specialist physicians, physician assistants, nurses and therapists in private, university and hospital practices. Through its MedMarketLink program, Vanguard combines the disciplines of online and offline PR, strategic marketing and information technology for healthcare providers coast to coast.