Off Topic: Disease Mongering

Diseases are created all the time!

Consider the diseasing of menopause and the marketing and distribution of HRT. It has been a common practice in the pharmaceutical industry to take life's discomforts and challenges, turn them into dysfunctions and then then label them as diseases...complete with a drug to treat it, pharma-sponsored educational programs for medical practitioners about the nature of these diseases and why their treatment is most effective, and massive marketing campaigns to alert healthy people that they may have said disease and can be 'successfully' treated for it. One health arena that this has been especially commonplace is in mental health. Anxiety is a relatively new 'disease' and used to be called 'nervousness' and recognized as the result of modern-day stresses in life. Then came the accidental development of benzodiazepines...and voila...a massive marketing of Librium and then Valium (both considered perfectly safe and non-addicting when initially introduced) and the pharmaceutical industry made a fortune! And more recently PMS has taken on psychiatric diagnosis of PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder) complete with a pill to treat it. That pill, by the way, is Serafem...which is a re-packaged (pink and purple capsule) exact replication of Prozac...which coincidently lost it's patent just as Serafem was introduced. Serafem has its own patent (more $) while Prozac is now a generic (less $)...while being the exact same drug, although the name and capsule color is thought to be more appealing to women. And then we have Social Anxiety Disorder...you're not shy and introverted, are you?!

Here are a list of links that discuss disease mongering. Notice the articles are not written by 'whacked out Conspiracy theorists'. The last three links explore the history of anxiety and development of benzodiazepines, and is fascinating to note the chronilogical dates in that history (especially from 1950 forward).

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/324/7342/886?ijkey=a51c6699ca413c...

http://bmj.bmjjournals.com/cgi/content/full/326/7379/45

http://www.prwatch.org/prwissues/2003Q1/monger.html

http://www.newint.org/issue362/peddling.htm

http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/06_19/b3983037.htm?campaign_id=s...

http://medicine.plosjournals.org/perlserv?request=get-document&doi=10.1371/jo...

http://anxiety-panic.com/history/h-main.htm

http://www.benzo.org.uk/valium2.htm

http://www.drugawareness.org/Archives/3rdQtr_2003/record0009.html

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