Drug Facts Boxes: Towards U.S. Health Care Reform

Although their study on "drug facts boxes" was published in the Annals of Internal Medicine a few months ago, with health care reform a popular current topic in the U.S. media, the work by Drs. Lisa Schwartz, Steven Woloshin, and Gil Welch deserves renewed attention.

These physician-researchers focus on making drug ads more understandable. To this end, they designed and studied a "drug facts box." The drug facts box - a panel displaying medical study outcome data and modeled after the nutrition information on the side of a cereal box - was shown to help people understand drug risks and benefits when added to drug ads in popular magazines. The positive findings recently helped the drug facts box gain some advocates in the FDA.

Although the U.S.'s drug regulatory agency has yet to make a formal decision, adopting the drug facts box seems an easy choice. An informed consumer is a boon to any marketplace and the U.S. health care market needs particular help. The politicians and decision-makers swinging for the health care reform fences should support drug facts boxes in direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical advertising.

(Full disclosure: Drs. Woloshin, Schwartz, and Welch are all associated with The Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice (TDI). I received an MPH from TDI last month).