Digital Archiving of Direct-to-Consumer Marketing Claims Made by Businesses Selling Unproven Stem Cell Interventions
Journal of Medical Internet Research ·
Over the last 2 decades, a large global marketplace has emerged in which businesses use direct-to-consumer advertising to sell putative stem cell treatments that are unsupported by convincing scientific evidence of safety and efficacy. It is common for such purported stem cell therapies not to have been reviewed and approved by national regulatory authorities, even though they are supposed to undergo rigorous premarketing review by regulatory bodies responsible for evaluating such medical products and determining whether they are backed by sufficient evidence to warrant approval. The marketing claims, commercial activities, and clinical practices of such businesses have resulted in patients experiencing serious harms, including loss of life, physical injuries, financial losses, and avoidable delays in accessing evidence-based treatments. Such businesses are also responsible for collective harms, including diverting patients from participating in legitimate stem cell clinical studies, damaging the field of credible stem cell research, and contributing to public confusion and misunderstandings about how to distinguish evidence-based stem cell therapies from stem cell interventions that are not backed by robust data. Researchers in bioethics, health law, the social sciences, and other academic fields have made important contributions to the critical analysis of direct-to-consumer digital marketing claims made by businesses selling unproven and unapproved stem cell interventions. Scholars studying such marketing representations have documented the use of persuasive “tokens of legitimacy” to make advertised stem cell interventions seem credible, trustworthy, and backed by current scientific evidence. Acknowledging the value of such scholarship, there is a growing need for the development of best practices in research methods and data-archiving practices. In particular, there is a need for increased digital archiving of online marketing claims made by businesses selling supposed stem cell treatments. Numerous parties can benefit from increased digital archiving of such problematic marketing representations. However, analyzing, archiving, and critiquing the marketing claims, business operations, and clinical practices of such businesses must be done in a careful, rigorous, and evidence-based manner that is attentive to the intimidating tactics some of these businesses use when responding to public criticism. Researchers need to document the marketing representations made by businesses selling unapproved and unproven stem cell interventions in ways that minimize exposure to legal threats and other efforts to suppress critical analysis. Using the Wayback Machine or other comparable archiving tools to create digital repositories of such marketing representations is one way to mitigate such threats, by capturing the exact claims such businesses make when promoting putative stem cell therapies. Archiving such digital marketing representations is important for academic research and can play a valuable role in other contexts, such as in legal actions taken against businesses using purportedly deceptive marketing claims to sell unproven and unapproved stem cell-based interventions.