There’s a pill for that!
No matter what ails you, there is a pill for that. And if nothing ails you, just wait. Pharmaceutical companies are working on drugs right now that just need a disease to treat. So let’s invent one! It’s what Big Pharma watchers call disease-mongering. For example, we used to call it laziness, but now we know that being lazy is really a medical condition called Motivational Deficiency Disorder. Or how about Insufferable Perkiness? Just ask your doctor about the new depressant drug Despondex to help the annoyingly cheerful in their battle against this heartbreaking disorder. And don’t even get me started on Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder!
Need to take a pill for something, anything? We’ve got drugs for everything.
The term ‘disease-mongering’ was first coined by author Lynn Payer in the 1992 book Disease Mongers: How Doctors, Drug Companies and Insurers Are Making You Feel Sick. “Pharmaceutical companies sponsor diseases and promote them to both prescribers and consumers,” wrote Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath and David Henry in April of that same year in the British Medical Journal.
“There’s a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they’re sick. Some forms of medicalising ordinary life may now be better described as disease mongering: widening the boundaries of treatable illness in order to expand markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. The social construction of illness is being replaced by the corporate construction of disease.” Read more…
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