I almost didn’t post this because, jaded as I am, it just doesn’t seem surprising in the least.
Drug companies ‘inventing diseases to boost their profits
PHARMACEUTICAL companies are systematically creating diseases in order to sell more of their products, turning healthy people into patients and placing many at risk of harm, a special edition of a leading medical journal claims today.
The practice of “diseasemongering” by the drug industry is promoting non-existent illnesses or exaggerating minor ones for the sake of profits, according to a set of essays published by the open-access journal Public Library of Science Medicine.
The special issue, edited by David Henry, of Newcastle University in Australia, and Ray Moynihan, an Australian journalist, reports that conditions such as female sexual dysfunction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and “restless legs syndrome” have been promoted by companies hoping to sell more of their drugs.
“Disease-mongering turns healthy people into patients, wastes precious resources and causes iatrogenic (medically induced) harm,” they say. “Like the marketing strategies that drive it, disease-mongering poses a global challenge to those interested in public health, demanding in turn a global response.”
Well, doesn’t there have to be a named disease or condition present before a drug can be legally prescribed?
And of course if you talk to a shrink, everybody has some kind of condition that can be treated with drugs.
I like these new drug commercials on TV where they show the doctor discussing the side effects with patients or other doctors.
“Hey Johnny, you need this drug because you have fast growing eyebrow disfunction. Now this drug isn’t for everyone, if you experience dry mouth, explosive diarehha, siezures, vertigo, or itchy eyes, be sure to contact me”
Yes, we is a right morally doctored utopia. Half our nation’s favorite thing to do after church is to go home, self-medicate a very bad case of ignorance with a six-pack of man-juice and burp and root for one group of steroid junkies to pound another group of steroid junkies into crippled middle age in between tasteless ads for tasteless stuff that gives ya gas, keeps ya from passin’ that gas while–despite yer restless leg and infected nails–yer pressin’ on and guzzlin’ gas in a sporty car on the way to the emergency room to cure a thirty-six hour hard-on unless, of course, you got liver problems. They the worst ’cause if you got them, the side effects of most modern medications is death so yer stuck with most everything short of ceased. Ceased, not deceased. What is it about people saying the dead is deceased anywho? If you is dead, you has ceased, right? Seems to me if you has been deceased you done risen from the grave or sumthin, but everybody politely calls the dead deceased anyway. So is that flippin’ ‘ skull tattooed to yer tit or pierced into yer navel?
Me? Yeah, I got hypocriticocondria and that ain’t good at all because my family health insurance just went from $600 to $1,500 a month in one years’ time. That’s more’n I made per month in my first full-time job in 1979. So damn more many things to worry about and pay for these days and I’d tell ya all about ’em ‘cept I’m so very sick about all this. Anyway, you can always rest comfortable knowing one irrefutable medical fact about yerself. You was the fastest swimmer in the whole bunch, too, and that means we is all very special despite the smells we sometimes emanate involuntarily ’cause we was born this way.
Baby boomers plus increased longevity equals more old people, a demographic not unnoticed by the advertising and drug companies. But the current crop of oldsters have been targeted by slick commercials for most of their adult lives so are not the easy marks assumed by the marketeers. And yes, the commercials are formulaic and subject to ridicule by their supposed targets.
This suspiciously reminds me of something I heard once about how the Chinese had a medical system (maybe they still do) consisting of where you pay your doctor a kind of periodic retainer fee to keep you from getting sick. If you do get sick, you withhold payment from him until he gets you well again. (I heard a story about this; if anyone has anything more to add about it, please do). Anyway, in this scheme the doctor’s obviously going to want to know what your lifestyle is, what kind of foods you eat or how much you drink and smoke, for example, and charge you accordingly. Money. Now there’s an incentive to at least try to live some kind of healthier life (assuming you can afford such a thing, of course). It would seem from that perspective, that the Western style of capitalistic medicine has got it all bass-akwards.
Cut to our good old American ‘health care’ system: If you get sick, you pay, and there are plenty of Greed Engine corporations to kind of “help” you to get sick, so they can reap the rewards from such a marketing campaign. I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute that they do this, and I’m sure they would say, hey, the market wanted it, we didn’t know any better etc. Is it too much to say that they need to urge us to live hard, make some bucks off that, and then sell us medicines to try to cure the result? (very lucrative…). A smiling corporate face, with snappy advertisements of happy people enjoying themselves, while their hands are busy working overtime. But, hey, I’m sure they really don’t know what they do, because it’s really us that ultimately causes it, and we cheer the fuckers on!
Listening to guys like Noam Chomsky, Joel Bakan, Michael Moore et al they sound like a bunch of old-line leftist sourpusses, and I would be the first to say that it’s really the consumer, educated or not, that wants all the THINGS that these corporations sell. Who’s marketing to who, though?
(cut to a Firesign Theater skit with a guy in a TV commercial saying, “I’m not really a doctor, even though I look like one…”)