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"New" diseases: the power of marketing

Labelling people as "sick" does them no favours and needlessly exposes them to potentially serious risks.

These days pharmaceutical companies’ sales strategies are designed to alter the social perception of health disorders and to create as close a link as possible between people suffering from these disorders and a drug treatment.

Extending the market for a drug to people who are not in fact either seriously or genuinely ill is an established practice. In the 1920s, a pharmaceutical company managed to increase sales of an antiseptic tenfold by promoting it for a new disease, "halitosis", a so-called chronic disease with serious social consequences, which is nothing more than bad breath. More recently, Pfizer succeeded in replacing the negative term "impotence" with "erectile dysfunction", which suggests that the condition is reversible, and thus facilitates the promotion of sildenafil. In 1999 Lilly managed to obtain approval from the US drug regulatory agency for fluoxetine for the new indication of "premenstrual dysphoric disorder" (i.e. women’s mood swings prior to their periods). This indication has, for the time being, been rejected by the European drug regulatory agency on the grounds that it is not a well-established diagnostic entity.

Health professionals must remain critical, and refuse to allow the pharmaceutical industry to create new illnesses or to define who is sick and who isn’t.

©Prescrire May 2007

Source: "Façonner des maladies : l’emprise du marketing" Rev Prescrire 2007 ; 27 (283) : 381-382.

English version: "Shaping diseases: marketing departments flex their wings" Prescrire International 2007; 16 (90): 174.

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