Evelyn Pringle
Natural News.com
July 31, 2009
In an article titled, “Disorders Made To Order,” in the July 2002 issue of Mother Jones Magazine, Brendan Koerner described the “modus operandi” of marketing a disease rather than selling a drug, “typical of the post-Prozac era.”
“The strategy [companies] use-it’s almost mechanized by now,” said the late Dr Loren Mosher, a San Diego psychiatrist and former official at the National Institute of Mental Health, in the article.
“Typically, a corporate-sponsored “disease awareness” campaign focuses on a mild psychiatric condition with a large pool of potential sufferers,” Koerner noted.
“Prominent doctors are enlisted to publicly affirm the malady’s ubiquity,” he said. “Public-relations firms launch campaigns to promote the new disease, using dramatic statistics from corporate-sponsored studies.”
“Companies fund studies that prove the drug’s efficacy in treating the affliction, a necessary step in obtaining FDA approval for a new use, or ‘indication,’” he wrote.
“Finally, patient groups are recruited to serve as the “public face” for the condition, supplying quotes and compelling human stories for the media; many of the groups are heavily subsidized by drugmakers, and some operate directly out of the offices of drug companies’ P.R. firms,” Koerner explained.
The disease focused on in Koerner’s article was generalized anxiety disorder, or GAD. The PR firm credited with orchestrating the successful campaign of selling the disease and Paxil to treat it, was Cohn & Wolfe, working for GlaxoSmithKline.
As an ex-employee of Cohen & Wolfe, Katherine Stone serves well as one of the “public faces” for the Mothers Act disease mongering campaign, complete with her own website, Postpartum Progress.
Read entire article: http://www.naturalnews.com/026742_depression_disease_postpartum_depression.html
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