Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13081
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Cassels A.
Spreading disease by word of mouth: A is for Archie with AMDD and B is for Ben who has Bad Boy Behaviour
Toronto Star 2008 Mar 4
http://www.thestar.com/article/308921
Full text:
Author and University of Victoria researcher Alan Cassels today begins a bi-weekly column examining a modern health threat: the corporate-funded shaping of illnesses. The Healthy Skeptic will take Star readers on a tour through the alphabet of disease mongering.
Hear about the new prescription drug clinically tested on more than 3,000 teenagers who suffer from low motivation?
The disease is called AMDD, or Adolescent Motivational Deficiency Disorder and the TV ads for the drug feature Archie, a lazy teenager lounging on a couch. Archie is unresponsive to his nagging, cajoling parents who take him to the clinic to get a script for the drug Robophil.
Next scene, the birds are singing as Archie gets off the couch and goes to apply for a job. Cue the tagline: “Got an unmotivated teenager? See your doctor.”
Wait a minute! A drug for laziness? Gotcha. Yes, I was fooling you, but if you found yourself starting to swallow this tale, you may be forgiven. Even though there is no AMDD, no “disease” of teenage laziness and no drug like Robophil, if and when this new disease ever gains medical legitimacy, it’ll have lots of company.
Welcome to the modern epidemic of disease mongering. It’s a phenomenon that is amplifying our natural desires to apply medical solutions to every abnormality, ache, dysfunction or worry that comes our way, even if the underlying problem has nothing to do with our body chemistry.
For some people a new diagnosis may be a lifebuoy and the associated treatment is the right and best solution, yet for many, a new label and the accompanying pharmaceutical only bring more problems.
A few years ago after I introduced AMDD in a CBC radio documentary, researchers in Australia followed with their version: MoDeD (Motivational Deficiency Disorder) launching the new disease in the British Medical Journal on April Fool’s Day, 2006. Despite the obvious clues (their drug was called Indolebant) MoDeD was reported by major media outlets around the world, sometimes missing the joke.
While AMDD and MoDeD are intentionally phony diseases, you don’t have to sail into the world of imagination to find diseases being shaped and mongered by those who have something to sell.
Which brings us to B, and “Bad Boy Behaviour.” You may know this disease by its more medical sounding name, Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD). One way to sleuth out disease mongering is to look for what’s really happening under the clinical-sounding name. “Bad Boy Behaviour” – like laziness – would never sell in the world of high-tech medicine, but ADHD and its respectable pharma treatments, sells like gangbusters.
Labelling and medicating hyperactive youth is as problematic as it is popular. It is estimated that more than 10 million school children in the United States wear the ADHD label and more than a million take daily doses of Ritalin-type stimulant drugs.
Do the millions of children around the world so labelled constitute a medical epidemic? As you could guess, the controversy around ADHD is explosive, with critics claiming the growth in sheer numbers of kids diagnosed and drugged is clearly the result of pharma marketing and blatant disease mongering (the journal Health Affairs reported that the “global use of ADHD medications rose threefold from 1993 through 2003.)
Others say the phenomenon is real and kids are literally driven to distraction by many factors including a worsening social environment, insufficient physical exercise, too much junk food, crowded classrooms and so on.
Suffice to say, AMDD and Bad Boy Behaviour are the flip sides of the same disease-mongering phenomenon, which partly makes all of us question what lies at the heart of “normal” in order to drive us toward a neat medical box. At the end of the day, a little healthy skepticism wouldn’t hurt many of us, especially when someone in a white coat is trying to usher us off the couch with a handy diagnosis and a magic medical solution.
