Selling Anxiety Sells Medicine.

With such direct-to-consumer ad campaigns, which highlight risk factors and promote screening tests, drug companies move beyond promoting certain pills for treatment of diagnosed conditions to expanding their use in healthy people. And selling prevention through prescription drugs certainly does fill pharmaceutical industry coffers. Healthy people, preferably in early middle age, who can be persuaded to take a drug daily for the rest of their lives, are clearly the industry’s most desirable customer base. But as a category, these people who are at low risk of having the problem the drug is meant to treat may still suffer a serious adverse reaction. For example, Fosamax cuts the risk of hip fracture from 2% to 1%, but that small benefit may not be worth the 1.5% risk of suffering an esophageal ulcer. In addition, in a small percentage of women using Fosamax over the long term, the jawbone will start to crumble. And some research now suggests that the type of new bone created by Fosamax is more brittle and more prone to fracturing over time. The over-selling of postmenopausal hormones, supported by the depiction of natural menopause as a hormone deficiency disease, was the forerunner to this type of sales pitch, which now permeates the media. Aging, social anxiety disorder, heartburn, restless leg syndrome, and overactive bladder are all examples of symptoms or normal physiological events that are now presented to consumers as being in need of long-term drug treatment. http://www.womensmediacenter.com/Daily_Exclusives5.html

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