(AGENPARL) - Rome, Jun 06 - A stroke of the pen can bring billions to pharmaceutical companies. In fact, it could happen that you fall ill from one day to the next and not because your health conditions have changed, but because the medical parameters have changed, so that from being healthy you immediately become ill. It is the phenomenon of the so-called. “Disease Mongering” which translated means “commodification of the disease”. Wikipedia defines it as "a marketing operation aimed at introducing a drug ready to be placed on the market through an advertising campaign aimed at introducing clinical pictures outside the medical session to induce the consumer to search for a remedy for specific diseases". In short, if once the most suitable antidotes were sought to cure diseases, now diseases capable of curing healthy people are being created.
This often happens by acting on medical parameters, lowering the tolerability thresholds which only increase the audience of potential customers, or by giving a name to simple behaviors or disorders (such as cellulite or baldness). A study published in the American journal of associated physicians, JAMA, in 2002 calculated that the 87% of those who draw up clinical guidelines have conflicts of interest due to ties with the pharmaceutical industry, and that of these, the 59% has relationships with the manufacturers of drugs relating to the pathologies for which it is called upon to draw up the guidelines. Disease mongering is nothing more than a large industrial operation aimed at the medicalization of everyday life, where everything tends to become disease and there is a pill for everything. Many are betting that even the latest killer flu (swine and avian) were nothing more than a gift to the pharmaceutical companies that then produced the vaccines. Suffice it to list the numbers of Avian (2003-2007) 369 cases in the world (234 deaths). In Italy no case. Costs: 53.8 million euros divided as follows: 31,135,000 aid to breeders from the Regions, 16,700,000 aid to breeders from the State. 5,500,000 for the reservation of 38 million doses of vaccine. 602,000 for the purchase of 150,000 doses of a pre-vaccine intended for first responders. As far as the parameters are concerned, the most widespread diseases can be taken as an example. Diabetes: "Normal" value if Glucose < 140 mg/dL (up to 2000) - New parameter if Glucose < 126 mg/dL (after 2000) Triglycerides: "Normal" value in June 2003: 200mg/dL (2.3 mmol/L) - New "normal" value (July 2003): 150 mg/dL (1.7 mm ol/L)
Wednesday 06 June 2012 11:27
