Africa Speaks Reasoning Forum

Pharmaceutical firms are inventing diseases to sell more drugs that place healthy people at risk, a leading medical journal claims.

"Disease-mongering" promotes non-existent diseases and exaggerates mild conditions in order to boost profits for the industry, according to the online journal Public Library of Science Medicine.

Researchers said conditions such as restless legs syndrome - an urge to move one's legs - and female sexual dysfunction were being presented as more prevalent than they actually were.

Pharmaceutical companies are selling their treatments through disease-mongering tactics that frame ordinary physiology in terms of disease, according to a series of papers published Tuesday in a leading medical journal.

The 11 publications in PLoS Medicine claimed the industry portrays mild problems as serious diseases, promotes risk factors as diseases, and makes medical problems out of ordinary life events such as menopause. 

“Disease mongering turns healthy people into patients, wastes precious resources, and causes iatrogenic harm [harm induced by a physician's actions],” said a paper by the journal’s editors, Ray Moynihan and David Henry.