British FDA Report Finds Healthcare Blogs As Influential As Old Media

Earlier this year, the MHRA--Britain's FDA--got a report from a British web consulting firm analyzing the influence and popularity of various online information sources for people interested in learning more about Seroxat (Paxil's UK name) and the MHRA. It's not clear why the MHRA commissioned the study, but apparently the agency realized it was being pounded by numerous British bloggers over its role in letting a problematic anti-depressant stay on the market with few warnings for consumers about withdrawal problems and other side effects, so the agency apparently wanted to learn how much impact all these newfangled blogs were having.

What the MHRA learned from this report (6.4 MB pdf) is that blogs and the people who write them are as influential as many traditional media websites and traditional corporate websites and are more influential than are many well-financed healthcare websites such as WebMD. The report only looked at how influential blogs were as regards the MHRA and Seroxat (as opposed to the FDA and Paxil) to give the whole thing a British slant.

Included among influential and popular blogs in no particular order were Pharmalot (US), Seroxat Sufferers (UK), Seroxat Secrets (UK), the Carlat Psychiatry Blog (US), Furious Seasons (my All-American blog), Clinical Psychology and Psychiatry (US) and Health Care Renewal (US). For popularity and influence, we ranked right up there with wire services, the London Times and the Wall Street Journal and only slightly trailed the BBC and the New York Times. This is all quite astonishing when you think about it--underfinanced blogs having as much influence as the WSJ! Unthinkable! US blogs that barely mention the MHRA (and usually write about Paxil not Seroxat) being more influential than WebMD--the world has come undone for sure!

You can skim the report for yourself and draw your own conclusions. Obviously, there are going to be biases in how the report's analyses were done and what search terms were used and so on (you'd get different results if the consultants had gone after the FDA and Paxil), but what the MHRA has learned reminds me of what political parties and the mainstream media learned about US political blogs in 2004 and that is that they cannot ignore them. The reading public has voted with its eyeballs and has decided that blogs matter, and matter in some cases much more than Big Pharma's own websites and more than pharma-funded health care sites like WebMD. And that my friends smells like victory.

I simply cannot wait until the FDA figures this phenomenon out for itself. Advertisers too.