The answer is short - directly to consumer advertising. If you do not know what it is read first the article and watch the video from the Sunday NY Times The Selling of Attention Deficit Disorder. Here is the story in the nutshell
When federal guidelines were loosened in the late 1990s to allow the marketing of controlled substances like stimulants directly to the public, pharmaceutical companies began targeting perhaps the most impressionable consumers of all: parents, specifically mothers.
As result
The Journal of the American Academy of Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, went from no ads for A.D.H.D. medications from 1990 to 1993 to about 100 pages per year a decade later. Almost every full-page color ad was for an A.D.H.D. drug.
Which in its turn lead to this statistics
... the number of children on medication for the disorder had soared to 3.5 million from 600,000 in 1990. He questioned the rising rates of diagnosis and called them “a national disaster of dangerous proportions.”
“The numbers make it look like an epidemic. Well, it’s not. It’s preposterous,” Dr. Conners, a psychologist and professor emeritus at Duke University, said in a subsequent interview. “This is a concoction to justify the giving out of medication at unprecedented and unjustifiable levels.”
So what, you may say, if it helps children and parents? Well, not so fast ...
Many doctors have portrayed the medications as benign — “safer than aspirin,” some say — even though they can have significant side effects and are regulated in the same class as morphine and oxycodone because of their potential for abuse and addiction. Patient advocacy groups tried to get the government to loosen regulation of stimulants while having sizable portions of their operating budgets covered by pharmaceutical interests.
Even Roger Griggs, the pharmaceutical executive who introduced Adderall in 1994, said he strongly opposes marketing stimulants to the general public because of their dangers. He calls them “nuclear bombs,” warranted only under extreme circumstances and when carefully overseen by a physician.
Psychiatric breakdown and suicidal thoughts are the most rare and extreme results of stimulant addiction, but those horror stories are far outnumbered by people who, seeking to study or work longer hours, cannot sleep for days, lose their appetite or hallucinate. More can simply become habituated to the pills and feel they cannot cope without them.
Do not forget that we are often talking children in their teens and nobody knows statistics and side effects for long-term use of these medications because they have been around for less then 20 years.
So what is the connection with 23andMe? Very simple -- direct advertising to the consumers who want a miracle to happen and are unaware of potential problems. Here is the article from Monday's Los Angeles Times --
23andMe's genetic tests are more misleading than helpful.
Personal genetic testing has been building toward a craze for some time, as evidence mounts that certain genes or mutations can affect individuals' health profiles. Consumer interest often spikes with news events: Anne Wojcicki, the founder and CEO of 23andMe, says inquiries poured into her office in May, after actress Angelina Jolie disclosed that she'd undergone a precautionary double mastectomy upon learning she carried a gene that predisposed her to breast cancer.
What Anne Wojcicki did not mention that the test Angelina Jolie used is most likely a patented test developed by the company
Myriad Genetics and this case is
patented, which means
23andMe could not use it. That's not all -- the test is very expensive about $3,000 (maybe it slightly less because of this year Supreme Court Decision) and while, according to the company,
it is covered by most insurances co-payment is still $100 or even as high as $375. Is
23andMe test approved by FDA? Obviously not, and most likely is not covered by insurances.
That is not all. 23andMe is using direct advertising
Another reason is its aggressive national advertising, for which it budgeted $5 million for 2013 alone. But that was before the FDA swooped down; the TV ads have been taken off the company's YouTube channel.
Yet you can still see this slick commercial featuring Mohammed Ali
and many others.
"Any reasonable interpretation would assume this is news you can use, until you get to the disclaimer," says David Hunter of the Harvard School of Public Health, a critic of direct-to-consumer marketing of genetic testing. "The problem is we are notoriously poor at estimating risk and communicating relative and absolute risk."
In the
previous posting we warned you that technology is still very young and interpretations of the test or to be more exact rush to conclusion could be extremely misleading. Here is the perfect example of
23andMe conclusions.
In a fawning recent profile of Wojcicki, for example, the magazine Fast Company reported that Google's Brin changed his lifestyle after a 23andMe test revealed that he carries a genetic mutation associated with a higher risk of Parkinson's disease — "30% to 75%, compared to 1% for the general population," the magazine reported.
That sounds like a horrific near-certainty that Brin will succumb. But it actually means that if Parkinson's affects 1% of the population, Brin's risk is 1.3% to 1.75% — based on his genetic profile alone, and leaving aside the role of environmental factors in Parkinson's. Nor do the raw figures explain that the incidence of Parkinson's rises sharply with age, with as little as 4% of all cases appearing before the age of 50.
That is why our statement that genetic testing is still to early to make over-the-counter supported by many physicians.
The problem with the service provided by 23andMe and its competitors — and the root of the FDA's concern — is that raw genetic information is very hard for a lay person to interpret. "The technology is just not ready for prime time," says David B. Agus, a USC cancer specialist who co-founded Navigenics to market professional genetic testing services.
Or, for example, another article
What Do Doctors Think About 23andme? from Forbes magazine.
The "public" outcry provoked by some media talking heads and techno-libertarians is not by any means justified. Do not fall victim to techno propaganda and paranoid distrust to the government. There are plenty of honest people who worked for the government as well. And FDA, if anything, is the best and most efficient part of the government driven by principal
Primum Non Nocere -
First Do No Harm.
That is why we
created petition supporting FDA actions regarding 23andMe and urging you to consider signing it and help spreading the word and ask your friends to do likewise.