Who Are the Opinion Leaders? The Physicians, Pharmacists, Patients, and Direct-to-Consumer Prescription Drug Advertising

A popular perception holds that physicians prescribe requested drugs to patients influenced by mass mediated direct-to-consumer prescription drug advertising. The phenomenon poses a serious challenge to the two-step flow model, which emphasizes the influence of opinion leaders on their followers and their legitimating power over the informing power of the mass media. This study investigates a 2002 Food and Drug Administration (FDA) survey and finds that patients searching for drug information through mass and hybrid media in newspapers and magazines' small print, the Internet, and toll-free numbers are more likely to seek information through interpersonal communication channels like health care providers. Patients using small print, toll-free numbers, one's own physician, and other physicians are associated with influencing their physicians with various drug-requesting behaviors. But physicians only prescribe requested drugs to patients who are influenced by other health care providers, such as pharmacists and other physicians, not the mass media. The influence of expert opinion leaders of drugs is so strong that the patients even would switch from their own unyielding physicians who do not prescribe drugs as advised by the pharmacists. Physicians and patients all are influenced more by other expert opinion leaders of drugs than by the mass media and therefore still uphold the basic tenet of the two-step model.