Can you trust Band-Aids?

Band-Aid is a household name, but can you trust the way they’re promoted?

For years Johnson & Johnson, the manufacturers of Band-Aid adhesive bandages, have been making a simple claim about them. If you put a Band-Aid on a cut, it will heal faster than it would have if left uncovered.

Specifically, they say it will heal twice as fast:

Johnson & Johnson is a large, well-known medical company. As well as Band-Aids, they make many other health and health adjacent products such as shampoo for babies, cold medicines, and mouthwash. For better or for worse, this means many of us are willing to accept their claims at face value.

In an ideal world, that would be fine. They don’t have a reputation for being misleading, like the reputation Reckitt Benckiser has earned for its misleading claims about Nurofen. They’re also not selling products that are clearly dodgy, like homeopathy or a quantum magnetic health analyser.

If all of us took the time to look into every health claim we encountered, we’d have no time left to eat or sleep. So, in cases like this, we often feel satisfied that if such a big company were making a dodgy claim someone would have caught it and called them out.

Well, that’s exactly what happened in this case. In early 2017, Dr Ken Harvey contacted Johnson & Johnson to ask them to provide the evidence for the “heals cuts twice as fast” claim they were making. In response, Johnson & Johnson did not send him the evidence. Instead, they opted to remove the claims.

“I gently asked them where was the evidence, it’s a fairly strong claim,” Dr Harvey told Fairfax. “And they hummed and hawed and eventually decided, I got a lovely letter from them, saying there was evidence – but they are removing the claims.”

Band-Aid promotions to be ripped off the shelf after complaints about healing claims | The Age

I was alerted to this by a member of the Australian patient advocacy group Friends of Science in Medicine*, which has similar aims to the New Zealand Society for Science Based Healthcare that I chair.

At the Society for Science Based Healthcare, we decided we wanted to make sure that the same change would be reflected over here. So, in April 2017, I wrote to Johnson & Johnson:

Kia ora,

I saw the other day that Johnson & Johnson will be removing promotional material in Australia saying Band-Aids are “clinically proven to heal wounds faster”. http://www.theage.com.au/national/health/bandaid-promotions-to-be-ripped-off-the-shelf-after-complaints-about-healing-claims-20170413-gvk985.html

Similar promotional material for Band-Aids exists in New Zealand. Does Johnson & Johnson also plan to remove these? For example, these online ads for various Band-Aid products all say they can make cuts heal twice as fast as if they were uncovered, and it looks like the same claim is made on the packaging too:

• https://www.thewarehouse.co.nz/p/band-aid-tough-strip-regular-20s/R917865.html
• https://shop.countdown.co.nz/Shop/ProductDetails?stockcode=225613
• https://nzonlinechemist.co.nz/products/bandaid-plastic-strips-25s

If Johnson & Johnson does not plan to remove these ads, will they be willing to publish the evidence alluded to in the statement provided to Australian media?

Sincerely,

Mark Hanna
Chair, Society for Science Based Healthcare

A couple of weeks later – after their Director of Regulatory Affairs for Australia, New Zealand, and Japan had returned from leave – I received this response:

Dear Mr Hanna,

Re: Band-Aid® Brand Adhesive Bandages

I refer to your correspondence in relation to our Band-Aid® Brand Adhesive Bandages.

I can confirm that the product sold in New Zealand is the same as the product sold in Australia. Any changes that we make to our promotional and packaging material for Australia will, therefore, be reflected in the New Zealand market.

Thank you for your enquiry.

Yours sincerely,

Andrew Harris B.Sc(Hons) PhD
Director, Regulatory Affairs

Great, the claim on the packaging would be removed! A win for consumers, all done and dusted I guess. Except… all those examples I sent to them were text on a supplier’s website. Would their suppliers all be told of the change they should make to the way Band-Aids could be promoted? I asked:

Thanks Andrew, it’s good to have confirmation on this. I assume, then, that Johnson & Johnson will be contacting all of its New Zealand retailers to ensure they update their marketing materials for these products?

Sincerely,

Mark Hanna
Chair, Society for Science Based Healthcare

This time, I never heard back. Obviously I can’t say for sure, but in my opinion it’s likely that Johnson & Johnson never responded to that question because they had nothing else to tell me that wouldn’t make them look bad.

I don’t think they ever had any plans to contact their suppliers about removing this claim from promotional material that Johnson & Johnson didn’t have direct control over. I also don’t think they’ve contacted their suppliers about this in the months since they agreed to change their packaging.

In fact, if you check those example links I sent to them in April, you might find the “Heals cuts twice as fast” claim is still there. At the time of writing, that claim was still present at all three links.

But it’s not just their suppliers that are the problem. In early June, a couple of months after Johnson & Johnson agreed to stop claiming that Band-Aids can heal cuts twice as fast, Society for Science Based Healthcare member Daniel Ryan noticed that the claim was still made on over a dozen pages on the Band-Aid New Zealand website. He laid a complaint about this with the Advertising Standards Authority.

Unsurprisingly, his complaint was settled in July when Johnson & Johnson voluntarily removed the claims:

The Chair [of the Advertising Standards Complaints Board] acknoweldged the Advertiser’s response to the complaint confirming it had made changes to the website voluntarily and without admission, removing packaging images containing statements which were of concern.

ASA Complaint 17/185

Though Johnson & Johnson are clearly happy to be seen doing the right thing – removing claims that they are unwilling or unable to substantiate – it seems to me that they have also been very willing to ignore many places where these claims continue to be made, and to delay their removal through inaction.

It reminds me of Reckitt Benckiser’s behaviour in the case of the misleading claims they made about Nurofen specific pain products. Even though they were eventually forced to remove the claims (accompanied by a paltry fine, in their case), they still made a healthy profit in the meantime.

Perhaps more importantly, during the intervening time in which the claims remained, they were only further cemented as part of public knoweldge. So even though they’re no longer used, they’ll probably still come to mind when people are deciding whether or not to buy them:

“Band-Aids heal cuts twice as fast? Yeah, I’m sure I heard that somewhere.”

This is often what supposedly reputable health companies rely on. Even if they’re forced to remove misleading claims, people will still remember the old claims.

And if no one complains, nothing happens.

* I’m also a member of Friends of Science in Medicine (though not particularly active, since I focus my efforts on New Zealand issues), and Dr Ken Harvey is on their executive.