Drug firms 'inventing diseases'

Pharmaceutical firms are inventing diseases to sell more drugs,
researchers have warned.

Disease-mongering promotes non-existent diseases and exaggerates mild
problems to boost profits, the Public Library of Science Medicine
reported.

Researchers at Newcastle University in Australia said firms were
putting healthy people at risk by medicalising conditions such as
menopause.

But the pharmaceutical industry denied it invented diseases.
..................
.
. DISEASE-MONGERING
. Restless legs - Prevalence of rare condition exaggerated
. Irritable bowel syndrome - Promoted as a serious illness needing . .
. therapy, when usually a mild problem
. Menopause - Too often medicalised as a disorder when really a normal
. part of life
.
.................

Report authors David Henry and Ray Moynihan criticised attempts to
convince the public in the US that 43% of women live with sexual
dysfunction.

They also said that risk factors like high cholesterol and
osteoporosis were being presented as diseases - and rare conditions
such as restless leg condition and mild problems of irritable bowel
syndrome were exaggerated.

The report said: "Disease-mongering is the selling of sickness that
widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who
sell and deliver treatments.

Campaigns

"It is exemplified mostly explicitly by many pharmaceutical
industry-funded disease awareness campaigns - more often designed to
sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the
prevention of illness or the maintenance of health."

The researchers called on doctors, patients and support groups to be
aware of the marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry and for
more research into the way in which conditions are presented.

They added: "The motives of health professionals and health advocacy
groups may well be the welfare of patients, rather than any direct
self-interested financial benefit, but we believe that too often
marketers are able to crudely manipulate those motivations.

"Disentangling the different motivations of the different actors in
disease-mongering will be a key step towards a better understanding of
this phenomenon."

But Richard Ley, of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical
Industry, said the research was centred on the US where the drugs
industry had much more freedom to promote their products to the
public.

"The way you can advertise is much more restricted in the UK so it is
wrong to extrapolate it.

"Also, it is not right to say the industry invents diseases, we don't.
It is up to doctors to decide what treatment to give people, we can't
tell them."