Two old stories by a curious but telling coincidence made it into the top news last week. One re-ignited the ADHD isn’t bad parenting or poor diet, it’s an illness (and genetic to boot) debate; the other reminded us just how determined Big Pharma can be when it comes, as they say in financial circles, to helping us grow our GDP. The theme which unites these two stories is medicalisation – that tendency to transform the vagaries of human nature into ‘real’ illnesses.
A Professor Thapar from the Land of the Leeks blew the genetic trumpet for ADHD. A number (as it turned out, an embarrassing small number) of kiddos with ADHD had a higher proportion of scrambled genes compared to non-ADHD kids, suggesting that ‘ADHD is not purely a social construct’. No longer is Morgan-Jones Minor an A-hole the size of Australia, oh no boyo, Morgan-Jones Minor has an illness, and a genetic one to boot. The weakness in this line of argument, given that most of the ADHD kids didn’t have the genetic defect, was promptly pointed out by the well known couch torpedo Oliver James, who helpfully added it was all a load of outrageous hype, aimed at boosting sales of anti-ADHD drugs.
Meanwhile, a Ray Moynihan, a learned hack from the Antipodes, has been busy showing how Big Pharma invents illness in the pursuit of profit. Ever since Viagra put the Big back into Ben, not to mention billions of dollars into drug company coffers, the drug industry has been beavering away hyping female sexual dysfunction (FSD), a female equivalent to erectile dysfunction, to create a vast new pool of patient need. And the industry, Moynihan notes coyly, ‘shows no signs of abandoning plans to meet the need it has helped to manufacture’.
Neither ADHD nor FSD have yet graduated as mature diseases; both inhabit the grey territory of disorder and dysfunction. At one end of the spectrum there are no doubt real patients with real diseases (even if we have yet to define the diagnosis and pathology) who need real medical treatment, whilst at the other end we have exaggeration, hype and the transformation – medicalisation – of that which is properly ordinary into pseudo-illness.
By all means, make it atomic for me – and equally less atomic for Morgan-Jones Minor. But do us a favour – don’t make out we are ill when we are not.
My Black Cat is sniffing around the MedComms right now. She wonders if they might be pretty active in helping Big Pharma with their illness inventions – for a fee.
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/9909663
and
http://www.medcommsnetworking.co.uk/
and
http://www.medcomms.co.uk/scientific-writing/
Don’t knock the MedComm gang, Witch Doctor. That’s my fall-back career for when the University finally decided ageing teaching hacks with no research grant income are persona non grata and boot me out the door.
It seems that while Dr No was writing this post, Witch Doctor was composing this excellent post. Dr No expects FSD to be the new menopause, and Libigel the new HRT (until, that is too many ladies of a certain age end up sprouting down in embarrassing places…)
Now I’m even more confused.
I was thinking FSD was going to be the new “occasional ED”, but now Dr No tells me it’s the new menopause.
Or is it going to be the new menopause because it didn’t quite “fly” as the new ED?
Dr A – perhaps it wasn’t DN’s best post. Perhaps DN is himself menopausal. What he is trying to say is that the menopause and normal variants of sexual interest/activity have/are being re-classified as illnesses that benefit from drug treatment – only the real beneficiaries are not the pseudo-patients, but the drug companies (or rather their shareholders). Big Pharma is playing the same game with FSD as it did with the menopause – and to that extent, FSD is the new menopuase.
This sort of wheeze is fine if you are creating a need for hand made kitchens amongst those who can afford such things. Playing fast and loose with normal human variation and then selling Snake Oil on the back of it is seriously dodgy.
When I spent a year in the US in the late 90s I remember being very struck by the direct-to-consumer marketing of drugs – an example was the ad campaign which basically said “If you have any kind of reflux go to your doctor and demand omeprazole”.
Visiting the states again a few years later I saw a campaign plugging SSRIs for “social phobia”, which struck me as another obvious “medicalising normality” campaign. As I recall they had a line of ads fronted by a famous American football player, who was just about the last person you could see having trouble getting talking to members of the opposite sex at parties.
I think what I meant with the earlier post was that they had re-positioned the marketing for FSD a bit. First of all, presumably inspired by Viagra and the way it racked up such huge sales by creating its own market among people who didn’t actually have ED, I had the impression they were simply pushing FSD along with the drugs. Sort of get it on the market by bigging up FSD, and then shifting ooodles of the drugs with “Viagra for women, nudge nudge”. Since that approach didn’t really seem to play big, they have now re-positioned FSD into the menopause “frame”.
The market for such a drug is said to be worth billions, so BioSante will be laughing all the way to the bank now that Boehringer have withdrawn their rather different “Atomic” version from the race.
“German drugmaker Boehringer Ingelheim has stopped developing a drug dubbed the “pink Viagra” after failing to convince U.S. regulators the experimental pill could boost women’s sex drive.
“The decision was not made lightly, considering the advanced stage of development,” chief executive Andreas Barner said on Friday of the hoped-for moneyspinner aimed at premenopausal women with a persistent and unexplained lack of sex drive.”
Me? I’d rather have a Smallbone Spell Pantry any day!
Sorry about having a go at your “Plan B” (or C or D) Dr Aust!