Read this book and some things start to make sense. Things like those obviously misleading commercials on television and in magazines. You know the ones I’m talking about. Those that tout the latest drug that makes you think that life before treatment was a living hell but after treatment its just one endless dance in a sunny spring field filled with daisies.
Everything these days is marketed, and prescription and OTC drugs are leading the way. Whether bladder control disorder (made up disease), sleeplessness (mostly made up), toe fungus, erectile-dysfunction, genital herpes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and even high anxiety, (what the commercials call social anxiety another made up disease once called shyness) the message is the same: Ask your doctor.
Greg Critser, author the Fat Land masterfully traces the creation of ‘Big Pharma’, what NBN has long called PHIC, the pharmaceutical industrial complex. Through a series of interviews with pharma executives, politicians and DC agency types, Critser shows readers the unrelenting thirty- year force to yield higher profits that eliminated the once concrete divide between R& D and marketing, and created today’s world where branding conditions as diseases and creating consumers for them is no different than selling Velveeta or Doritos. Worse, many of these conditions were never considered medical illnesses before drug companies marketed their products aimed at ‘curing’ these illnesses. And of course, creating new medical conditions all while buying politicians with freedom and ease, like so many people lined up at a fancy buffet for a free feed.