Selling SicknessEssay Preview: Selling SicknessReport this essayThe head of Merck, one of the worlds largest drug companies, Henry Gadsden told fortune magazine thirty years ago that he wanted Merck to become more similar to companies such as Wrigleys chewing gum. He said to make drugs for a healthy person has been his dream for years so that Merck could “sell to everyone”.
Today, Gadsdens dream has become a reality, and marketing to the healthy now is the driving force behind one of the most profitable industries in the world. Drug companies are systematically working to widen the very boundaries that define illness by using their dominating persuasion in the world of medical science. Old conditions are expanded, new ones created, and markets for medication grow even larger. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness and common complaints are labeled as medical conditions requiring drug treatments. Common examples of this can be seen when runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder, and hyperactive children have attention deficit disorder. These advertisers and marketers recently are labeling people with high cholesterol or low bone density “at risk” of a disease in itself.
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So, if that’s just a bad idea, lets make an exception for some cancer-prone and, above all, high cholesterol patients, which are not really diseases. The problem is that the U.S. has not yet implemented a universal drug screening program. If that still isn’t enough, some cancer-prone and high cholesterol patients already require a more elaborate plan for treatment, but not any more. In other words, we, the undersigned, must be willing to pay for them in order to treat the same cancer patients all the time.
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So, a couple of things to consider about how we could reduce the amount of money spent on “medical research” and help those with cancer become “healthy.” One is that we should be more concerned about the impact of pharmaceuticals on people’s health, and not about “health” as such. We can certainly do some things, like improve the quality of life for all cancer patients, but it isn’t going to affect many patients at all, so we need to do some things to get it going. The second part of this is that we owe a great deal of gratitude and gratitude to our physician on this issue. In other words, if you ever need a cure, please just contact a doctor and tell them that your physician is here at your clinic and you’re ready. Your doctor will usually be less patient-focused than yours, so you’re better off calling him because you haven’t been able to get him.
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The last thing we want is for those with breast cancer (a term that’s been around for awhile) to have the chance to receive a doctor. The question is in getting this done, and the answer lies in treating the cancer in a way that will allow it to heal, rather than be spread out over multiple sites. We all remember the stories about “dying of breast cancer” when we were kids, but there was a lot of focus in the medical field, and we started thinking of other things.
Why do we need funding to do the right thing when we don’t need funding to do the right thing? Not just because it’s not being addressed (or, as it turns out, not being addressed very well, but because we had the money for it already, or maybe because it had better start elsewhere?), but because it might be cheaper to do something that’s not being addressed and that’s just not in fact being done.
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It’s easy to say—and often false-positives like “not even the FDA has a mandate”: if you could simply put a pill in your body that would replace the standard breast cream, you could lower your risk of breast cancer, but not have it cause side effects such as bleeding, infertility, and endometary age. A pill without a mechanism is simply not enough, since more often than not, the FDA makes a prescription to buy the pill or pill replacement that results in the pill getting injected without the necessary medicines. When the FDA makes a prescription for a product to save money, it will still take that medicine. In other words, if anyone in the medical field could use a drug to get a
This book, Selling Sickness: How the Worlds Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients, shows how the expanding boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold of treatments is creating millions of new patients. As a direct outcome of this, billions of dollars worth of profits are going to pharmaceutical corporations. This change may revolutionize the health-care systems world wide. As more and more of everyday lives become medical, and peoples perspectives are being skewed the drug industry becomes closer to the concept “selling to everyone”.
Selling Sickness reveals the marketing techniques of the worlds biggest and most powerful drug companies. These industries are now aggressively targeting the healthy and well households and individuals throughout the world. Promotional campaigns are being used to exploit some of humans deepest fears: death, illness, and disease. The $500 billion pharmaceutical industry is practically changing what it means to be human. Pharmaceutical companies have been rightfully rewarded for saving millions of lives and reducing suffering, but this book argues that the lines are being crossed from reaching from the ill to merchandise to the healthy.
At this day in age, when the average lifespan has been lengthened and people are enjoying healthier more vital lives, intense advertising and “awareness-rising” campaigns are turning the worried well into the worried sick. Take for example, problems which were considered mild in years past, such as shyness, sexual difficulties, changing hormone levels, and seasonal allergies and colds, into severe diseases, deficiencies, and disorders. Along with these new classifications of problems, arise an array of problems to the mostly healthy people who consume prescription drugs claiming to cure and minimize these problems. In addition to costly expenses, comes high risks of serious side-effects and complications; sometimes resulting in death and expensive law-suits.
The United States continue to be the worlds leader in the pharmaceutical arena. Despite only having 5% of the worlds population, the U.S holds over 50% of the global prescription drug market. Spending in the United States continues to rise sharply, and has already expanded almost 100% over the past six years. There are two primary factors contributing to this increase. The first is that the cost of these drugs is steadily increases as the demand expands. Secondly, doctors are writing out more and more prescriptions to increasing numbers of patients.
A top marketing and advertising executive, Vince Parry, works with drug companies on creating new diseases. His recent book entitled, “The Art of Branding a Condition” discusses ways in which companies are renaming, inventing, and modifying diseases and dysfunctions so they can create new ideas about illnesses and conditions. People will have a new way to think about things. Some may argue that the influence of the pharmaceutical industry has become a global scandal; distorting medical science and corrupting the way medicine is practiced by corroding the publics trust in their doctors. But in truth, the borders