Vaginal Mesh Advertising – More of a Legal Than a Medical Problem?

In 2008 the Food and Drug Administration issued a warning about transvaginal mesh (TVM) systems, indicating that the risk of complications was thought to be greater than originally stated. From that time until 2011, more than 1,500 complaints were filed. When patients have a legitimate concern about complications caused by medical devices, attorneys – and any subsequent lawsuits – provide an effective way to recoup any loses and seek compensation for injury or damages. It’s certainly true that TVM lawsuits have recently had some success in the courts. Thousands of TVM cases have been filed across the country

The pace of legal advertising for transvaginal mesh cases may simply have grown too quickly.

That’s a lot of cases, and a lot of publicity. Now, a study has suggested that the amount of legal advertising vastly outstrips medical information, and that patients are hearing about TVM from lawyers before doctors.

Presented at the 2013 American Urological Association Annual Scientific Meeting, the findings from Dr Michelle Koski indicate that women are getting worried by personal injury lawyer advertising. A poll of two urological and urogynecological clinics found that most women’s knowledge of TVM came from legal advertisements, with two thirds of women polled already aware of mesh devices without having spoken to a doctor. Online, radio and television commercials encouraging legal action were credited with the women’s understanding of TVM.

90% of Google search results were also found to be advertising personal injury lawyers rather than doctors or transvaginal mesh itself.

It seems there’s a growing imbalance between attorneys looking for cases and encouraging legal action and the amount of available information related to doctors and patient’s actually using the product. Ambulance chasing for a digital age? Hardly, although it does raise interesting questions for mesh manufacturers and physicians themselves, in how they approach online marketing.

Doctors are not effectively reaching women before attorney’s advertisements. Only 9.1% of women asked agreed that they had “first heard about mesh from [a] medical professional,” although, in what the researchers described as “encouraging,” three quarters of women were still open to the use of mesh if suggested by a doctor.

The pace of legal advertising for transvaginal mesh cases may simply have grown too quickly. Patients being unable to find credible information because search results return only lawyers websites may also be of some concern. As Koski points out, medical opinion remains divided, with some doctors remaining “advocates” of mesh treatments. She also highlights that the aggressive advertising of some lawyers does include misleading or false information.

The 2008 FDA warning, which seems to have sparked an increase in complaints and lawsuits, has since been followed by a 2011 update warning of “serious complications associated with surgical mesh.” There are certainly grounds to the many lawsuits alleging that TVM has lead to injury. Perhaps, though, in the public’s eye, the effects of the system have been exaggerated too much in favor of it being an inherently defective product. Patients should be receiving strictly medical advice from physicians and the FDA first and foremost, and from attorneys only once a need arises.

The impetus is very much on doctors, though, and not attorneys, to seek any redress to the imbalance.