Integral to the Super Bowl tradition are the notable TV ads that run during the game. Among them for this year were commercial spots for two major U.S. health systems: New York City-based NYU Langone Health and Charleston, S.C.-based MUSC Health.
NYU Langone’s ad featured Former New York Giants receiver Victor Cruz, who “drew parallels between sports and healthcare teamwork,” according to a Feb. 5 press release from the system.
“It’s all about them coming together for the common goal,” NYU orthopedic surgeon Joseph Zuckerman, MD, the Walter A. L. Thompson professor of orthopedic surgery and chair of the department of orthopedic surgery, said in the ad. “When you think about it, you know, NYU Langone Health is the No. 1 academic medical center in the United States for quality and social safety. Four thousand five hundred physicians, 50,000 employees. That doesn’t happen without a lot of teamwork.”
MUSC Health’s commercial focused on heart and vascular care and featured cardiologists Garrison Morgan, MD, and Joshua Coney, MD, and heart and kidney transplant recipient James Page, according to a Feb. 6 press release.
In the other healthcare-related ad, online prescription provider Hims & Hers stirred up controversy with a commercial for its GLP-1, which is a knock-off of the weight-loss drug Wegovy, according to a Feb. 10 report from The Boston Globe.
The commercial talked about the American weight loss system, saying that it “feeds on our failure” and is ”built to keep us sick and stuck.”
Last week, several lawmakers criticized Hims & Hers, claiming that the company does not disclose side-effects and safety information to its users.
The Partnership for Safe Medicine issued a statement with the headline, “Over 100 million Americans just watched a misleading ad at the Super Bowl,” and sent complaints to the FDA and Fox Broadcasting.
