Disease mongering: this is how Big Brother, the one told by George Orwell in 1984, enters people's minds to persuade them to buy new medicines.
Literally the phenomenon is called: commodification of the disease. An extreme practice developed by marketing strategists and applied to the pharmaceutical galaxy. Diagnosis of disorders due to behavioral anomalies such as shyness, lowering the peak values of diabetes and that's it: the number of patients increases. We even get to invent new diseases to produce new drugs.
Through this mechanism people are persuaded that problems previously accepted as inconvenience or part of life, must cause concern and require medical attention. Already thirteen years ago, in 2002, the British Medical Journal published the International classification of non-diseases: 200 conditions wrongly considered pathological.
The first ten on the list are emblematic: ageing, work, boredom, tear sacs, ignorance, baldness, freckles, protruding ears, grey/white hair, ugliness. According to research, half of the pharmaceutical products on the market today are useless.
Class struggle is good for health I padroni del farmaco sono alla ricerca della massimizzazione del profitto. La strada spesso è aperta dall’pharmaceutical representative, che corrompe il medico prescrittore con regalie e benefici, con l’effetto di distorsione, ma non è l’aspetto principale della questione. La corruzione è un fenomeno che si verifica a valle. A monte c’è la sistematica distorsione delle conoscenze scientifiche. Si possono fare molti soldi dicendo alle persone sane che sono malate…
