Are you someone whose child is struggling to perform everyday tasks due to lack of motivation, low impulse and just plain laziness? Have you ever wondered why? What if there was a drug for laziness or low impulse? I am pretty sure a lot of you might even consider getting a prescription for it.
Well, even though there is no drug for laziness, if and when this new drug ever gains medical legitimacy, it will have lots of buyers. Welcome to the modern epidemic of disease mongering. It's a phenomenon that is amplifying our natural desires to apply medical solutions to every anomaly, ache, dysfunction or concern that comes our way, even if the underlying quandary has nothing to do with our body chemistry.
The overlap between business and medical ethics through disease mongering represent a moral minefield and is attracting increasing attention. Everyday aspects of ordinary life, such as menopause and migraines, are portrayed as serious illnesses. Informal partnership of pharmaceutical corporations, public relations companies, doctors' groups and patient advocates promote these ideas to the public, often using media to push a mild problem as a serious health crisis.
This trend, while still growing, shows that disease mongering is a powerful method being used nowadays to exploit people’s concern about imperfection in them and their faith in scientific advancements. The pharmaceutical industry's practice of using commercials to promote drugs directly to consumers is a kind of disease mongering that does more harm than good.
Many people are prone to believe what they see and hear, regardless of whether or not it is actually true. Many, after viewing an advertisement, seek out a doctor’s visit and request the product or prescription for the product that was advertised.Stress Free for Good A lot of capital can be made from healthy people who believe they are unwell or inadequate.
An important disease mongering method is to add medical labels to what used to be seen as trivial conditions. The new difficult titles add even more credibility to the illness. Some everyday examples are occasional heartburn, now known as ‘Gastro-Esophageal Reflux Disease,’ and shyness, also termed ‘Social Anxiety Disorder’.
Without a doubt, severe variety of these conditions may indeed require vital treatment, but the pharmaceutical industry does nothing to distinguish between severe and mild symptoms. Diagnosis of an unknown illness can be very important and finding effective treatments certainly worthwhile, but it should be done in the interests of the patients and not in the interests of the pharmaceutical industry.
The motives of health professionals and health advocacy groups should be the welfare of patients, rather than any self-interested financial benefit. If everyday conditions are exploited, then people will begin to consider the human body as a perfect machine, and that any ailment can be instantly fixed with a pill. This raises unrealistic expectations of the healthcare system to cure people of any syndrome and absolves people from making the effort to care for themselves and better manage their health independently.
I hope in the coming years, our society will put a more vigorous effort to understand and challenge this unethical process.