Parading ailments to sell pills

Since 1997, when US first allowed TV ads that tout the latest drugs, Americans have had to watch a parade of ailments they knew little about. Selling sickness is now a multibillion dollar business. Some critics joke that the drug companies may soon sell a pill for the mass hypochondria their ads seem to create...
Some in the medical community are pushing back against the selling of drugs to treat mild conditions, or common aspects of life recategorized, such as shyness, as a medical condition. Sometimes they even invent new conditions such as prehypertension, and then offer a drug for it.

There's a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they are sick, concludes an article in the April 13 edition of BMJ, British Medical Journal, titled, 'Selling sickness: the pharmacutical industry and disease mongering.'
The article quotes that disease mongers 'gnaw away at ones self confidence by pushing drug based solutions to life's problems and exploiting fears of disease and death'. One leaked memo from a public relations firm told of how its 'medical education' campaign would turn 'irritable bowel syndrome' into a 'credible, common and concrete disease' requiring drugs.....
Senate majority leader Bill Frist, who is also a heart surgeon, said in a recent speech, " Drug advertisements...cause more people to take prescription drugs. They create an artificial demand. And just as the medical industry now recognises that ones thinking can improve health, it must know that regular images and suggestions of ailments are not in the public best interest."
Editorial, The Christian Science Monitor. June 16, 2006
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