Educational content and health literacy issues in direct-to-consumer advertising of pharmaceuticals

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical advertisements have been analyzed in many ways, but richer conceptualizations of health literacy have been largely absent from this research. With approximately half of U.S. adults struggling to understand health information, it is important to consider consumers' health literacy when analyzing DTC advertisements. This project, framed by the health belief model, analyzed 82 advertisements. Advertisements provided some kinds of educational content (e.g., drugs' medical benefits) but typically failed to offer other useful information (e.g., other strategies for dealing with conditions). Issues likely to be barriers to low health literate consumers, such as nonstandard text formatting, are common.