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August 02, 2002


Marketing a disease

Just when I thought I understood all the pharmaceutical industry tricks, bingo, they have a new one. First, you market the disease... then you push the pills to treat it

The modus operandi of GlaxoSmithKline - marketing a disease rather than selling a drug - is typical of the post-Prozac era. "The strategy [companies] use - it's almost mechanised by now," says Dr Loren Mosher, a San Diego psychiatrist and former official at the national institute of mental health. Typically, a corporate-sponsored "disease awareness" campaign focuses on a mild psychiatric condition with a large pool of potential sufferers. Companies fund studies that prove the drug's efficacy in treating the afiction, a necessary step in obtaining FDA approval for a new use, or "indication". Prominent doctors are enlisted to publicly affirm the malady's ubiquity, then public-relations firms launch campaigns to promote the new disease, using dramatic statistics from corporate-sponsored studies. Finally, patient groups are recruited to serve as the "public face" for the condition, supplying quotes and compelling stories for the media; many of the groups are heavily subsidised by drugmakers, and some operate directly out of the offices of drug companies' PR firms.

Posted by on August 02, 2002 06:13 AM | TrackBack




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It would be nice if everybody could find a doctor with half the common sense of this one. - Junkyardblog

An academic general internist comments on medical issues and the current state of medicine.

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