Posted by Emanuela Zerbinatti at 23:18 in Medicine and art, Theater from http://www.arteesalute.blogosfere.it
"The only way to defend yourself against "disease mongering" is to know about it". This is the conclusion they had come to Ray Moynihan And David Henry, respectively journalist and pharmacologist of the University of Newcastle (Australia), in theeditorial of the special number that Plos Medicines – a freely usable medical-scientific medical journal – had dedicated some time ago to this phenomenon. "Disease mongering" – which could be translated as "diseases created by marketing" – transforms the healthy into sick, causes iatrogenic injuries and wastes precious resources, for the sole purpose of increasing the number of sick and potential customers in the market of those who sell and distribute drugs. It's a global problem that affects everyone involved in health". Basically the art of creating the drug first and then the disease it is supposed to cure. This is a global problem, as the authors said, but it is not a modern-day phenomenon.
In knock, a play written in 1923, Jules Romains tells the story of a doctor who supports the infallibility of medicine and the effectiveness of commercial advertising who manages to induce the population of an entire country to undergo his treatments. In the sentence made to pronounce the protagonist "healthy people are sick who don't know they are" it contains all the thought of the most modern "dealers of diseases". And even in medical-scientific journals there is no shortage of attempts to define and study the phenomenon, as well as
