Section of Hygiene Epidemiology and Public Health, Department of Experimental and Applied Medicine, University of Brescia, Brescia, Italy.
Pharmacoepidemiol Drug Saf. 2010 Sep;19(9):970-6. doi: 10.1002/pds.2007.
Online pharmacies (OPs) are recognized as a potential threat to public health. The growth of an unregulated global drugs market risks increasing the spread of counterfeit medicines which are often delivered to consumers without a medical prescription. The aim of the study was to assess the strategies of argumentation that OPs adopt in their marketing.
A sample of 175 OPs was analyzed using the content-analysis method, and evaluated by relying on the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion.
Almost 80% of the sample of OPs did not ask for a medical prescription by the consumer's physician. The selling arguments used included privacy policy, economic, quality, and service issues. About one-third of the OPs did not declare any side-effects regarding the drugs offered.
Our results show that OPs advertise their products in an argumentative fashion that enhances consumers' peripheral reflection: by analogically playing with the selling of other commodities, they magnify aspects of the online trade that consumers might find convenient, but overshadow the nature and risks of the actual products they sell.
在线药店（OPs）被认为是对公众健康的潜在威胁。不受监管的全球毒品市场的增长有可能增加假冒药品的传播，这些药品往往在没有医生处方的情况下送达消费者。本研究旨在评估 OPs 在其营销中采用的论证策略。
使用内容分析方法对 175 家 OPs 进行了抽样分析，并依靠说服的详尽可能性模型（ELM）进行了评估。
样本中近 80%的 OPs 没有要求消费者的医生开处方。使用的销售论点包括隐私政策、经济、质量和服务问题。约三分之一的 OPs 没有声明所提供药物的任何副作用。
我们的结果表明，OPs 以一种增强消费者边缘思考的论证方式宣传他们的产品：通过类比销售其他商品，他们放大了消费者可能觉得方便的在线交易的方面，但掩盖了他们实际销售的产品的性质和风险。
