A new awareness campaign from Abbott highlights a major sticking point in diabetes management: the harmful impact of societal stereotypes and misconceptions about the condition.
The “Above the Bias” campaign launched earlier this month and stems from conversations the medtech giant has had with individuals throughout a decade of selling its FreeStyle Libre continuous glucose monitors, according to Katie Walker, director of public affairs for Abbott’s U.S. diabetes care business.
“We look at the whole person, and, anecdotally, we’ve heard from them about the various barriers that they have to getting care. It’s not just about technology,” Walker said in an interview with Fierce Pharma Marketing. “Through the years, we’ve heard from people living with diabetes—both Type 1 and Type 2—who have said that people don’t understand the condition and they make these comments or they have these misconceptions about what the disease is like, and it carries with them on a daily basis, it weighs them down.”
At the core of the campaign is a minute-long film that portrays that sentiment in a very literal way. As a man goes about his everyday life, with a gentle cover of Queen and David Bowie’s “Under Pressure” playing in the background, hurtful comments from colleagues, family members and his own doctor appear on slips of paper that stick to him.
Comments include a coworker’s quip, “I thought diabetics couldn’t eat doughnuts,” just as he’s about to enjoy a bite, and his wife wondering whether he’s checked his blood sugar before he can dig into a family meal. Meanwhile, a scroll through his social media feed shows a photo of an ice cream sundae captioned, “diabetes anyone?!” and a grocery store cashier gives him a skeptical look as he purchases a bag of candy.
Ultimately, all of the passing judgments pile up to create an overwhelming, abominable snowmanlike shell around the man. At the end of the film, so weighed down by the strips of paper, he ends up walking out of his doctor’s office before an appointment, as text onscreen says, “40% of people with diabetes skip treatments out of shame.”
That was the “most staggering” finding to come out of a survey Abbott commissioned of more than 2,600 people with diabetes in the U.S. and several other countries, according to Walker.
“That’s where it was very eye-opening for Abbott, where we were like, wow, these misconceptions and biases are creating another barrier for people to getting the care that they need,” she said.
The survey also found that nearly a quarter of people with diabetes have avoided sharing their diagnosis with loved ones due to embarrassment or concern. About 70% agreed that there’s a stigma associated with diabetes, and many reported having seen inaccuracies and jokes about the condition in the media.
In one phase of the survey, respondents were hooked up to biometric testing devices to measure their physical reactions to judgmental comments about diabetes. “Should you be eating that?” was one that produced an elevated heart rate equal to that of anxiety-inducing situations like a job interview or first date, Walker said.
With all of those findings in mind, Abbott created the campaign to encourage the general population to “end diabetes prejudice,” as stated in the film’s final call to action.
“We talk to people that are living with diabetes every day—they know what’s going on. This campaign is for everybody else,” Walker said. “If you look in the U.S., 1 in 6 American adults have diabetes, so we all know or love somebody that has this condition. So, we want this to go far and wide to everybody else who doesn’t have diabetes, to recognize that the words that they use and how they ask questions matters.”
In addition to the film, the campaign’s website features testimonials from people with diabetes, tips for unlearning diabetes biases and stereotypes and a quiz to help visitors debunk common myths about the condition.
Overall, she said, the campaign is part of Abbott’s work to “chip away” at the obstacles facing people with diabetes as they seek out proper care and treatment. It builds on the stigma-fighting efforts of other advocacy organizations and Abbott itself by targeting a broad audience “beyond just the diabetes community," Walker added.
In one indicator of the campaign’s reach to raise awareness, Walker reported, the film has already racked up more than 58 million views as of this week.