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Manufacturing diseases in order to sell drugs

It is in the interest of pharmaceutical companies for more and more of life’s events to be deemed to require drug treatment.

Driven by the continual quest for growth, pharmaceutical companies are constantly coming up with ways to expand their markets. One noticeable current trend is companies' determination to continually push the boundaries of what is considered pathological, and therefore requires drug treatment, preferably on a long term basis.

There are many ways in which companies "manufacture" illnesses: amalgamating disparate symptoms under a new entity declared to be pathological, artificially lowering normal thresholds to justify treating a higher number of people, or simply seeking to medicalise life’s ups and downs, which are relabelled as "pathological".

This applies for example to "premenstrual dysphoric syndrome", the combination of several symptoms presented by premenstrual women, invented by the pharmaceutical firms (in the USA) so they can offer drug treatment.

Mental health problems also lend themselves particularly well to the fabrication of diseases, as illustrated for example by the recent appearance of so-called "mood-regulating" drugs.

It is in the interests of pharmaceutical companies for all of life’s difficulties to be considered as "pathological" and a pretext for regular drug treatment. Let us defend life, with its ups and downs, against medicalisation.

©Prescrire January 2007

Source: "Fabriquer des maladies pour vendre des médicaments" Rev Prescrire 2007 ; 27 (279) : 63-65.

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