Creating Disease: Big Pharma and Disease Mongering

by Dr. Larry Dossey

'You may think there is enough disease in the world already, and that no one would want to add to the diseases that we humans must deal with. But there is a powerful industry in our society that is working overtime to invent illnesses and to convince us we are suffering from them.

This effort is known as "disease mongering," a term introduced by health-science writer Lynn Payer in her 1992 book Disease-Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies, and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick. Payer defined disease mongering as "trying to convince essentially well people that they are sick, or slightly sick people that they are very ill."'





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Papers from the Disease-Mongering Conference Now Available

We were happy to announce a while back that the Inaugural Conference on Disease-Mongering would be held in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, from 11 to 13 April, 2006.

Now we are also pleased to announce that a list of papers from the conference is available today from PLoS Medicine on the web here, and the links to the papers should go live later today. The papers look interesting, and we hope to report back on them after we have had a chance to read them.

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A Conference on Disease-Mongering

Blimey, more positive news...

If you can get to Australia in April, you can attend the Inaugural Conference on Disease-Mongering to be held in Newcastle, New South Wales, from 11 to 13 April, 2006.

The conference will bring together academics, researchers, health professionals, health managers, journalists, writers and consumers who share an interest and concern over the trend to corporate definitions of diseases with a primary interest in making profits rather than a concern for the public health.

The Conference will feature speakers who are internationally recognized in this field. We are also inviting free papers on any topic related to disease-mongering and medicalisation.

For those who want to submit papers (original research or commentaries), the abstract deadline is March 1.

I am glad these sorts of problems are now coming out into the open. We first have to recognize the problems before we can come up with solutions.

Thanks to PharmaGossip for the tip.

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More Downsides of a "Pill for Every Ill"

Two recent stories from the NY Times also accent the possible unintended effects of pharmaceutical companies' efforts to market "a pill for every ill."
One story was about the rush to develop drugs to combat obesity. Of course, obesity has health risks. But critics of the drug industry fear that the real appeal of such drugs would be to the only slightly overweight. This could lead to a huge market for such drugs. According to the Times, 60% of the US population is overweight. Thus "everybody is just foaming at the mouth to make money from obesity drugs." The danger, of course, is that new drugs often have rare serious side effects that are not detected in controlled trials on even thousands of patients. New obesity drugs might be taken by millions of patients, thus any such rare adverse effects could still affect substantial absolute numbers.
The other NY Times article was about increasing apathy towards safe-sex measures to prevent the spread of HIV. Some think that this is partly due to "drug company [direct to consumer] advertisements that gloss over the disease's effects by portraying patients as the pictures of perfect health." For example, Michael Weinstein, President of the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, cited an ad for Reyataz in Out magazine featuring two robust men on a beach. The ad includes an audio microchip. Opening the page "sets off the trill of a ringing phone and a man's voice essentially saying he is having too much fun to worry about his chronic illness." The San Francisco health department also fears that drugs for erectile dysfunction (ED, as the drug-makers like to call it) are another culprit, since they can counter the impotence caused by "crystal meth." ED drugs are widely marketed by direct to consumer advertisements, as anyone who has turned on network television in the last year must realize. Weinstein has called on Bristol-Myers-Squibb to stop running its audio enhanced ad, while the department of health is seeking to limit availability of "ED" drugs.
All the more reason to support the UK House of Commons Reports' call for "an industry led by the values of scientists, not those of its marketing force." (Quoted in the Guardrian.)

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