Healthy Skepticism Library item: 359

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

Buchanan K.
MP brands pill-making firms 'disease mongers'
The Western Mail 2004 May 26

Full text:

A WELSH MP yesterday delivered a damning indictment of the drug industry – accusing it of promoting “fake” diseases and turning Britain into a nation of pill dependant victims.

Newport West MP Paul Flynn said “disease mongers” marketed minor ailments as serious problems to push pills as the latest “wonder drug” while Britons were turning the normal problems of life into crippling health issues.

“We have been conditioned to believe there is a pill for everything,” he said.

“What we are doing is pushing people into a dependency culture. The disease mongers gnaw away at our self confidence by playing down our capacity for self coping.”

The Labour MP used a Westminster Hall debate yesterday to rail against what he called the “medicalisation” of life.

He said in the past people had simply coped with the normal problems of life, such as bereavement, obesity, baldness or loneliness, but modern society wanted to find its salvation in a pill. He told MPs that in 1994 there were 2.6 million people on anti-depressants in Britain but by 2003 that figure had risen to 14 million.

However, Mr Flynn said despite the rise in anti-depressants there had not been a similar reduction in the numbers of suicides or self-harming incidents.

He praised a Cardiff doctor handing out self-help books rather than prescriptions and urged Britons to use exercise and talking to tackle life’s normal problems rather than potentially addictive or dangerous drugs.

“Many lives have been destroyed to feed the profits of pharmaceutical companies and many people have been drawn into lives of dependency,” Mr Flynn said.

He also detailed the leaked marketing strategy of one drug company, GlaxoSmithKline, to transform Irritable Bowel Syndrome in the eyes of the public into a major health problem.

“What was not a disabling condition was given a make- over and it was re-marketed as a serious modern scourge,” he said.

Mr Flynn called for greater transparency of patients’ groups – which help lobby politicians for new treatments for sufferers of a range of different ailments.

He said while the mental health charity Mind accepted no donations from pharmaceutical companies, Depression Alliance was 80% funded by them. He said it was important to know whether patient groups were fully independent or “stooges for pharmaceutical companies”.