Antonella Randazzo
have proliferated in recent years the marketers that use the awareness of health issues as a powerful tool for selling drugs. They are also massively increase the advertising of medicines. At any time of day is transmitted spot to increase sales of pharmaceutical products against headache, backache, sore throat, colds, etc.. To make the message more appealing advertising, pharmaceutical companies sometimes use the white coats or, in campagne promozionali, anche personaggi noti, che diventano testimoni del "vissuto di malattia". Ciò tende a suscitare fiducia, che poi viene ad essere fiducia nel farmaco. Talvolta vengono organizzate vere e proprie campagne di promozione di alcuni farmaci.
Il fenomeno è stato definito "commercio di malattie" (disease mongering), e consiste nella diffusione di informazioni riguardo a malattie o a presunte malattie, con lo scopo di vendere farmaci. Si tratta di promozione commerciale camuffata da campagna d'informazione sanitaria. Sempre più spesso queste campagne sono organizzate e finanziate direttamente dalle industrie chimico-farmaceutiche.
La portata del fenomeno è assai più ampia di quanto si possa credere. Si tratta di spread anxiety and fears in relation to health, and then to propose the purchase of the drug as a problem solver.
Some of the "diseases" are touted as depression, ADHD, headaches and disorders.
campaigns of "trade disease" do not aim to really understand the roots of the problem, but to sell drugs.
Today the pharmaceutical sector is one of the sectors with higher profit for the industry, and thanks to advertising and other marketing initiatives, the market is expanding greatly.
This is a market that wants to continue to expand and to dominate, even at the expense of human health. Roberto says Satolli, president of Zadig (agency scientific journalism):
"All the actors involved have interests in solidarity: the specialists, which could increase the patients and consequently the income ... administrators of the centers of diagnosis or treatment, that recruit a greater number of clients and charge a higher volume of services, manufacturers of diagnostic equipment ... not least the drug companies, which ... act as the real engine of the chain ... actually dig a well, hidden behind the screen of a public relations firm, is often the financing of one or more companies, especially pharmaceutical companies. And the purpose is almost always the same: to amplify the importance (severity, distribution, implications economic and social, etc.) of this or that disease to recruit patients, increase performance, improve facilities, develop business ... worthwhile to dissect and remove the mechanism, and tested in all its details, in order to defend themselves from dangerous distortions that may have on the lives and health of people and the people. "(1)
Indeed, given the amount business and the high level of deception now, someone asks whether the drug is the first product and then invented and "disseminated" disease. The "work" should be to make each pathological symptom or small problem, to convince to use a whole serie di farmaci. In altre parole, si tratta del "disease mongering", ovvero delle tecniche per accrescere il numero delle persone che si sentono malate, al fine di vendere più farmaci. Spiega la rivista “PLoS Medicine”:
“Sotto l'etichetta di disease mongering vengono raggruppate tutte quelle strategie che puntano ad aumentare il numero di malati e di malattie con il solo scopo di allargare il mercato della salute. Anche se di questa pratica scorretta sono accusate principalmente le multinazionali del farmaco, tecniche analoghe possono essere messe in atto, per esempio, dagli specialisti, quando rivolgono improvvisamente la loro attenzione a particolari patologie, fino a quel momento "sottovalutate". Sono tante le tecniche available to a would-monger to create more disease patients: a change from physiological to pathological state (as in menopause), invented out of whole cloth a syndrome, describing it in an ambiguous way (female sexual dysfunction), change the definition of a disease , exaggerating the incidence and deliberately blurring the difference between severe cases - to be treated with drugs - and those that do not require milder treatment (ADHD), lowering the reference thresholds above which are recommended drug therapy (cholesterol levels, pressure blood), an association of patients sponsor to launch an awareness campaign about a disease labeled as "neglected." (2)
Clearly, pharmaceutical companies does not affect the health of individuals and indeed there are more patients and earn more, so much more interested that people feel sick and, above all, believe that to solve their problems through drugs. The pharmaceutical companies have become expert in organizing campaigns, "pro-disease" in which hired "experts" or people who allegedly healed of their medicines. To promote the disease using various means: scientific journals and, associations, doctors, the sponsors of various types, etc.. The aim is to convince that it is appropriate to use the drugs for every little noise.
Magazine "Pharmaceutical Marketing" he said in a "practical guide to medical education" should be created as the need for care before producing the drug. To do this you must turn leading scientists, who during the conference speak of "disease" diagnosis and treatment.
Other techniques have been explained by Philippe Pignarre, which for many years worked in the pharmaceutical industry. He argues that the pharmaceutical sector is the "crown jewel of capitalism" and to maintain high profits is willing to do anything. Pignarre explains some of the strategies used to often, "you publish the same article under different names, to increase public awareness of a new molecule and suggest to doctors that its benefits were actually retained, then it can be marketed under two different names even to impose it more quickly (this strategy of co-marketing), and finally becomes pressure to prescribe it at first, etc.. ... There is also the 'niche strategy': laboratories offer their product in the subdomain limited to a disease and then 'work to expand this niche, preparing medical screening and awareness to both the press and the general public. They were born as some 'new' psychiatric disorder ', as some forms of depression or schizophrenia early short front ... the difficulty of finding new medicines, laboratories, therefore, are going to invent new clients to sell their old products. To this end, they take all the tricks of the advertising system, using the tactics of communication addressed directly to the masses through the media. "(3)
In a society in which we sow fear, uncertainty and complex non-aesthetic is very difficult to convince someone that something is wrong with your body, and therefore need to take medication.
writer Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, the researcher wrote a book entitled "Drugs and drug companies that get sick we become patients" (Published by New Media Worlds, 2005), which tell the intent of the pharmaceutical companies, expressed by the general manager of Merck, Henry Gadsen, "to create drugs for healthy people, so they can sell their all."
Other scholars, such as H. Gilbert Welch, author of "Should I Be Tested for Cancer? Maybe Not and Here's Why "(" I have to do a check to see if I have cancer? Maybe not, and that's why "), said the" epidemic of diagnosis ", or the desire to do analysis and see if we have some illness. This is an epidemic that would also involve perfectly healthy people or with disorders that would not require any medication.
Marketing Disease aims to make us all sick, and make us believe that science can solve the psychological disorders that the same media environment encourages us to have. This market tends to exaggerate the problems and to give very high estimates of their distribution (the numbers are growing from year to year), to believe that it can easily be affected. The source from which the information is always doomed to authoritative "scientific" to make information more persuasive. However, often the data provided and other marketing messages about the disease is uncontrollable, because it is not specifically indicated the source. Most of the time these figures are approximate or even invented. Sponsors marketing campaigns of the disease tend to hide, to reveal that information can be objective because it is not motivated by economic interests. In many campaigns of the drugs, the sponsors (pharmaceutical companies) reach their goals thanks to television programs in which the information appears to be due to reasons of health protection. We use high-level marketing professionals to make effective promotional campaigns, and camouflage commercial initiative in an area dedicated to the common good.
In 2002, the British Medical Journal, about the "business of disease," wrote that "you can do a lot of money telling the healthy who are sick." (4) As noted
Gorged, the apparatus of the marketing of diseases is ready to provide its solutions:
"The conclusion is generally simple, even simplistic. After ingigandito risks ... In conclusion, it launches a reassuring message: do not worry, there is something (a drug, intervention, care) that solves everything without difficulty. Now the communication has almost invariably a rhetorical structure which refers to the theatrical function of the "deus ex machina, the final solver that intervention in an almost miraculous. Indeed one can say that this is the typical argumentative structure to their advertisements, in which the most important information (ie the one that is more dear to the speaker) rather than anticipated at the beginning, as in exposure reporting, often comes at the end of a path that performs the function of preparing the apotheosis. This is so typical, that may be "pathognomonic": When you suspect that a message has promotional purposes, you can skip to the end: the last lines if a drug is mentioned resolution, probably the suspicion is founded. "(5 )
In the area of \u200b\u200bdrug manufacturing, only six corporations (Bayer, Glaxo, Pfizer, Aventis, Novartis and Roche) control 70% of the world market, while also scientific research.
pharmaceutical cartels have oggi un notevole potere di creare farmaci e di metterli in commercio senza accertarne i rischi per la salute di chi li assumerà. Gli effetti collaterali sono spesso talmente pesanti da generare vere e proprie patologie o da compromettere gravemente la salute del paziente.
L'industria del farmaco deve di tanto in tanto lanciare nuovi farmaci o sostituire quelli che sono stati identificati come gravemente nocivi. Per vendere i nuovi farmaci, deve suscitare nuovamente fiducia, e ha bisogno di sollevare un notevole battage mediatico. Un mezzo efficace è quello di utilizzare le riviste più autorevoli del settore scientifico. I lettori di queste riviste credono che gli articoli siano "obiettivi" e invece sempre più spesso sono sponsorizzati dalle case farmaceutiche to support a new product that will soon be on the market.
The Director General of United Health Europe, Richard Smith, in a speech at the Medical Society of London in October 2004, explained the mechanism of propaganda of the pharmaceutical industry through scientific journals:
"The ads can often be misleading and profits in the millions, but the ads are there in plain sight, under the eyes of the critics ... The real problem, more importantly, has to do with the original studies, particularly clinical trials, published by magazines. Far from making them the tare, readers consider the test as a controlled random distribution of the highest forms of evidence. A large-scale test published in a major magazine has the mark of approval of the magazine (unlike the advertising) will be distributed worldwide and may well receive global media coverage, particularly if promoted simultaneously by the dropping printing of the magazine is both expensive public relations firm, hired by the pharmaceutical company that sponsored the study. For the pharmaceutical industry, a positive test outcome is what thousands of pages of advertising, so that sometimes a company gets to spend more than a million dollars on reprints of the study for distribution throughout the world. The doctors receiving the reprints can not read them, but will be impressed by the name of the magazine on which they appear. The quality of the magazine will devote the quality of the drug ... There is strong evidence that companies are getting the results they want, and this is even more disturbing because the two-thirds to three quarters of the studies published in leading journals - Annals of Internal Medicine, JAMA, Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine - are funded by ... There are a variety of publishing strategies to ensure maximum exposure of positive results. Some companies have resorted to trying to suppress the negative studies, but this is a crude strategy, which also should be rarely necessary se la compagnia sta ponendo le "giuste" domande. Una strategia di gran lunga migliore consiste nel pubblicare i risultati positivi più di una volta, spesso in supplementi alle riviste, che sono altamente vantaggiosi per gli editori e si sono mostrati di dubbia qualità... E' inoltre possibile combinare i risultati provenienti da differenti centri in molteplici combinazioni. Queste strategie sono state smascherate nei casi del Risperidone e dell'Odansetron, ma è un lavoro immenso cercare di scoprire quanti test sono davvero indipendenti e quanti, invece, sono semplicemente lo stesso risultato che viene pubblicato più e più volte."(6)
La fiducia acritica nella scienza e nella farmacologia è dovuta soprattutto alla propaganda media that everyone suffers, and prestige which are shrouded environments of science. Yet the facts show that the pharmacology is that conventional medicine can cause illness and death. Today would be about 90 dead a day in Italy for medical errors, due to side effects of drugs or diseases taken to hospitals. Only in our country then at least 30,000 people a year die because of medical and other related factors.
Moreover, the pharmaceutical cartels are now closely linked to major food companies like Kellogg and Nestlé. These companies carry out research on food additives, the preservatives, coloring or the "flavor". Over the past decades significantly increased both the use of psychotropic drugs, is the phenomenon of food adulteration, without the authorities have never raised the issue, despite the dramatic consequences. No citizen is never warned the authorities about the risks that may be incurred by taking drugs or consuming a particular food adulterated. Therefore, our authorities prove in this way to be subjugated by the power of the group that controls the food and pharmaceutical industries, and have no regard for people's health.
To ensure that each disorder has its corresponding treatment, the label even small disturbances such as diseases, symptoms or behaviors passengers. All this is made realistic through false or fictitious statistics and research. Way of generating new pharmaceutical care for the "timidity", tired legs, the "social phobia" or distraction.
The temporary sadness, perhaps for a death or divorce, it can become a curable disease with drugs. Get in a doctor's office means almost always receive medication, even if it is worth wondering whether the disorder is dependent on unhealthy eating habits or other causes beyond the pathological and easily avoidable.
Everyone knows that drugs can cause side effects, and so it would be best not to assume if there is no real need. Assume when you are healthy just because through technical media have convinced us that you have not is a sad paradox that shows the power level that the current system has reached on the individual. It 's like the current group in power to feel pleasure in having the opportunity to see how individuals are now air-conditioners. As Ivan Illich wrote, "industrial civilization creates new diseases and the medical system itself is far from healthy: A social and political structure finds its alibi in destructive power to satisfy their victims with therapies that they have learned to be desired . The consumer care becomes powerless to heal or heal those nearby. "
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NOTE 1) Latronico Nicola, Rasulo Frank, Candiani Andrea, "Brain. Brescia Anesthesia Intensive Care Neuroscience, Madeia, Naples 2006, p. 155.
2) "PLoS Medicine", volume 3, Number 4, April 2006.
3) Group Marcuse, "human misery of advertising our lifestyle is killing the world", Eleuthera, Milano 2006.
4) Latronico Nicola, Rasulo Frank, Candiani Andrea, op. cit., p. 157.
5) Latronico Nicola, Rasulo Frank, Candiani Andrea, op. cit., p. 158.
6) Excerpts from the speech that Richard Smith spoke at the Medical Society of London in October 2004. The speech was reported in January 2005 HealthWatch newsletter.
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