How drug companies sell treatments by inventing diseases

How drug companies sell treatments by inventing diseases

By wabby on Fri, 06/08/2018 - 9:06am |

Adriane Fugh-Berman, a professor of pharmacology at Georgetown University Medical Center, said the pharmaceutical industry medicalizes normal life by positing that a vague, highly relatable, everyday condition is symptomatic of a newly invented disease. In other cases, pharma exaggerates the prevalence or severity of an existing condition to entice more customers.

Lisa Schwartz and Steven Woloshin, co-directors of the Center for Medicine and Media at Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice, said disease-awareness campaigns may seem caring or educational but are often just marketing in disguise. The campaigns often follow three basic steps: lower the bar for diagnosis, raise the stakes so people want to get tested and spin the evidence about a drug’s benefits and risks. These steps were seen in campaigns on testosterone deficiency, bipolar disorder and restless leg syndrome.

URL:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/malady-mongers-drug-companies-sell-treatments-inventing-diseases-100040360.html

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Yeah, bi polar disorder, everybody and his uncle has it now. When it was a rare diagnosis like a decade ago. I think of psychiatry as still in the medieval stage, barbarous experimenting on humans due to true understanding being in its infancy. Just throw drugs in the patient, see which work. Then diagnose based on response!

Not to mention the decades long war on cholesterol before medicine really understood much about it at all. (And mho: they still don't! I wish someone would recheck with all the docs that were enthusiastically saying that they were taking statins themselves when they first were introduced, as if they were the new fountain of youth, see if many have changed their minds now.)

by artappraiser on Sat, 06/09/2018 - 5:42pm

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