Drug Firms Are 'Inventing Diseases'

[Richard]

Pharmaceutical firms are inventing diseases to sell more drugs, researchers have warned. Disease-mongering promotes non-existent diseases and exaggerates mild problems to boost profits, the Public Library of Science Medicine reported. Researchers at Newcastle University in Australia said firms were putting healthy people at risk by medicalising conditions such as menopause. But the pharmaceutical industry denied it invented diseases.Report authors David Henry and Ray Moynihan criticised attempts to convince the public in the US that 43% of women live with sexual dysfunction. They also said that risk factors like high cholesterol and osteoporosis were being presented as diseases - and rare conditions such as restless leg condition and mild problems of irritable bowel syndrome were exaggerated. The report said: "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 mostly 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." The researchers called on doctors, patients and support groups to be aware of the marketing tactics of the pharmaceutical industry and for more research into the way in which conditions are presented.

They added: "The motives of health professionals and health advocacy groups may well be the welfare of patients, rather than any direct self-interested financial benefit, but we believe that too often marketers are able to crudely manipulate those motivations. "Disentangling the different motivations of the different actors in disease-mongering will be a key step towards a better understanding of this phenomenon." But Richard Ley, of the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry, said the research was centred on the US where the drugs industry had much more freedom to promote their products to the public.

View: Full Article | Source: BBC News

http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/viewnews.php?id=66540

[Sariel]

PoliticsInHealing.Com

 
Politics in Healing:  The suppression and manipulation of American Medicine -- Daniel Haley, Author

http://www.politicsinhealing.com/

A former New York State Assemblyman who has spent a lifetime studying health and healing in America, Dan is a man uniquely able to tell the story of the damage greed and political influence has wrought on our nation's healthcare alternatives.  Dan has just completed and published a book written in clear and easy to follow language chronicling ten separate, well researched stories that will both shock and alarm you.  Dan's working title has undergone various changes over the several years of the book's preparation, ranging from "Politics in Cancer" to "The Terrible Truth about Politics in Cancer" and finally settling on "Politics in Healing: The suppression and manipulation of American Medicine."  Dan's information-packed 465 page book is an absolute "must read" for anyone interested in American medicine, healing, alternative healing modalities and treatments, and the abuse and interference of the political process in those treatments.

[xan-i]

Thankyou, Richard & Sariel for the article & links here.

Aye - this is no small area of misinformation for profiteering purposes - regardless of the damage done in the process! 

All 'diseases' can be categorised as - 'cellular impairment' - this is in fact one problem, not the very many that are named via symptomatic details arising from the ways in which the 'particular illness' manifests itself in the body. 

Surely, it is better to treat the cause of initial dysfunction - the vast majority of cases do not require any synthetic aid in this process.  We are led to believe that medication that alleviates the symptoms helps to cure the condition.  This is simply untrue.  By suppressing the symptoms and not treating the underlying cause ever-more damage arises within the system.

Symptoms are simply the body's way of alerting to an internal physiological 'problem' - the cause (not the symptoms themselves) needs to be identified before it is possible to administer a cure.

When all is said & done : The right way of healing works against the corporate pharmaceutical agenda.