KevinMD today refreshed an essay worth refreshing: a reminder that everyone who is trying to link immediate, direct benefits to the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge is basically full of it.
It’s a good lesson not to overreach with the benefits of healthcare social media – particularly when you can take more meaningful, authentic credit down the line.
Media throughout August credited the work of the Ice Bucket Challenge to a Johns Hopkins research finding that could explain why a certain protein clumps together in the brain of ALS patients. Even the researchers got into the act.
But essay author Dr. Paul Marantz, the director of the Center for Public Health Sciences at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, melts the connection: the finding is not a breakthrough, the research was going on long before the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge existed, and funding for this research came from seven funding sources.
Marantz, who originally published this post back in August, is not a fan of marketing-driven research (he concludes his post with the red herring that we shouldn’t “promulgate the notion that ‘crowdsourcing’ scientific discovery will get us where we need to go”).
But he’s right on this point: if healthcare social media tries too hard it tarnishes the credit it will eventually deserve (and, likely, the science itself). The money raised by the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge will take years to deliver anything of value. Such is the nature of scientific research.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Even then, any findings driven largely by that money will take even more years to make it to the market.
Marketers should keep the volume down on results, until the point they can name the nickname new breakthrough drug The Ice Bucket Legacy.
That’s the win – and it will help other marketing-driven fund-raising campaign succeed for years to come.
