The pharmaceutical industry spends more than $2 billion a year advertising direct-to-consumer drugs on TV, an increase of 30 percent over the past two years. Only the United States and New Zealand permit these ads.
Dr. Marcia Angell, former editor in chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, and author of "The Truth about Drug Companies," believes that if the drug industry can convince essentially normal people that minor complaints require long-term drugs to treat them, its market will grow. So-called disease mongering convinces people that their usually mild ailment urgently requires drug intervention.
And Dr. Arthur Caplan, professor of bioethics at NYU, says that a human condition such as attention deficit disorder, something that affects children and which they eventually outgrow, is increasingly being marketed as an adult condition. Caplan maintains that such routine human conditions as unhappiness, bone thinning, and stomach aches are increasingly being redefined as depression, osteoporosis, and gastritis. Other conditions cited as examples of disease mongering include restless leg syndrome, testosterone deficiency, and erectile dysfunction.
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