Google has decided to ban advertisements for untested medical treatments, including most gene therapies or stem cell therapies.
"Our new regulations will ban ads for treatments that are not based on established scientific or medical grounds," Adrienne Biddings, an adviser at Google, said Friday in an online statement. She cites experimental medical techniques such as most stem cell therapies and gene therapies. The ban will also concern "treatments that are derived from scientific discoveries and preliminary clinical experiments that have not been sufficiently tested," she added.
The online search giant has seen "an increase in the number of malicious actors trying to take advantage of people by offering untested, misleading treatments." Google says it's not about questioning the importance of medical discoveries in these areas, but believes that "regulated clinical trials are the most reliable way to test and prove medical advances."
Google joins Facebook and Pinterest against misleading medical messages
This change in conditions for advertisers is supported by the president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research Deepak Srivastava. "Premarketing and premature marketing of unproven stem cell products pose risks to public health, undermine confidence in biomedical research, and hinder the development of legitimate therapies," he said. according to the Google release.
Other platforms have taken steps to filter out misleading medical messages. Earlier this year, Facebook, YouTube (the Google video site) or Pinterest explained that they were fighting against the dissemination of misinformation about vaccines or advertising for fake cancer treatments.