In order to increase drug sales, you need healthy people to believe they're sick people. You need to turn healthy people into patients.
Think about the following:
General Motors spends more on health care than it spends on steel.
Starbucks spends more on health care than it spends on coffee beans.
Health care expenditures in the United States are approximately 16% of GDP.
Now ask yourself why. Why in America do we have the most expensive health care system in the world--not the best health care system?
Connect some the dots.
A few weeks ago I wrote a diary called, Disease Mongering and America's lust for medication. You can read it here, if you'd like:
http://www.dailykos.com/...
At the time, I didn't realize the significance this new concept which some ahead-of-the-curve intrepid science writers are calling, "disease mongering".
This is disease mongering:
Disease mongering is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. It is exemplified most 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.
http://collections.plos.org/....
Yesterday, The New York Times described the unholy alliance between pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession.
Three pharmaceutical companies donated $700,000 to a medical society that used most of the money on a series of dinner lectures last year to brief doctors on the latest news about high blood pressure.
Dr. Michael H. Alderman said a new definition of high blood pressure should be based on clinical data.
The same three companies -- Merck, Novartis and Sankyo -- also gave the money that the medical society used to formulate the main talking point of those briefings, an expanded concept of high blood pressure that many doctors say would increase the number of people taking drugs.
http://www.nytimes.com/...
It's no longer about you and your health, it's about expanding the patient pool for medications. It's about feeding the medical/pharmaceutical complex.
"This is about the monetarization of medicine," Dr. Michael H. Alderman, a past president of the organization, said in a recent interview.
The dinners promoting a new definition of high blood pressure illustrate connections -- among the pharmaceutical industry, academic physicians and societies that formulate opinion -- that can ultimately affect patient treatment. And the dispute within the society reflects a growing unease that industry money is influencing scientific discourse in medical societies and elsewhere.
At a recent speech before another society, the American College of Cardiology, its new president, Dr. Steven E. Nissen of the Cleveland Clinic, suggested that the medical profession had become addicted to industry money just as the nation was addicted to foreign oil.
What happens when the pharmaceutical industry in collaboration with "academic physicians and societies that formulate opinion" are able to redefine disease--in this case hypertension? They sell more drugs to people who were once considered healthy.
Dr. Alderman, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, is one of several doctors who withdrew from a group formed by the society to write the new blood pressure definition.
He complained that the definition was derived from a hodgepodge of opinions not supported by hard science, and also questioned whether the society of 1,600 could insulate itself from the drug company donations it used to operate.
Controlling blood pressure has long been a mainstay of the pharmaceutical industry. About 65 million Americans have high blood pressure under the current definition and they help fuel a $17 billion annual market in drugs for hypertension. But another 59 million people are on the borderline, and many doctors believe the new definition of hypertension could make drugs a standard treatment for many of them, drastically expanding the potential drug market.
This morning the Washington Post is reporting that Botox may become a new remedy for depression.
Kathleen Delano had suffered from depression for years. Having tried psychotherapy and a number of antidepressant drugs in vain, she resigned herself to a life of suffering.
Then she tried Botox, the drug that became a rage a few years ago for smoothing out facial wrinkles.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Who's paying for the "research"? Who's paying this doctor? If people suffering from depression begin to request botox to treat their illness, then the market for this very expensive drug could expand dramatically.
The pilot study of 10 patients is the first to provide empirical support for what a number of clinicians say they have noticed anecdotally: People who get their furrowed brows eliminated with Botox (botulinum toxin A) often report an improvement in mood.
Until now, the assumption was that they were just feeling better about their appearance. But the new study by local dermatologist Eric Finzi suggests that something else may be at work. Finzi found that even patients such as Delano, who were not seeking cosmetic improvement, showed a dramatic decrease in depression symptoms.
"Maybe the frown is not just an end result of the depression; maybe you need to frown in order to be depressed," Finzi said in an interview. "I don't think it has anything to do with making you look better. These patients were not coming to me for Botox; they were coming because I was offering a new treatment for depression."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
http://www.dermatologycosmetic.com/...
It comes down to trust.
Clearly you cannot trust many (most) of the nefarious claims of the pharmaceutical industry delivered to gullible American consumers 24/7 by every manner of advertising.
The next line of defense, your doctor--is (s)he equally complicit in this unholy melding of the medical profession and the rapacious pharmaceutical indstry?
Like almost everything in America, these days, you're on your own.
Out-of-control capitalism? One industry (pharmaceuticals), partly responsible for the possible demise of General Motors (skyrocketing costs of health care). Some argue that GM has morphed into an insurance company, building cars Americans will buy is secondary. Make no mistake, if GM declares bankrupcy, it will have dire consequences for all of us.
All this screams: single-payer health care.
I'll leave you with the words of Marcia Angell, the former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine:
Marcia Angell:These companies are justifying extremely high prices by saying they need this money to cover their high R&D costs, and they're very innovative, and that we should be willing to spend the money in return for the innovation. In the book, I question those premises. I say that, yes, they spend a lot on R&D, but still they make more in profits, and they spend two to two-and-a-half times as much on what they call "marketing and administration." If you want to argue that they need the high prices to cover R&D, it would make more sense to argue that they need the high prices even more to cover their marketing costs. I just want to put that in perspective. Also, their profits are enormously high. Until last year, [they were] the number one industry in the U.S. in terms of profits. In 2002, the top 10 American [pharmaceutical] companies in the Fortune 500 made 17 percent of their sales in profits, whereas they spent only 14 percent on R&D. The median for the other Fortune 500 companies was between 3 percent of sales. So, you can't make an argument that they're just eking out a living, just managing to cover their R&D costs.
http://www.motherjones.com/...