{"id":7777,"date":"2007-01-25T14:10:00","date_gmt":"2007-01-25T14:10:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.pharma-mkting.com\/disease-mongering-and-pharma\/"},"modified":"2019-02-21T01:26:35","modified_gmt":"2019-02-21T01:26:35","slug":"disease-mongering-and-pharma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ec2-54-175-84-28.compute-1.amazonaws.com\/pharma-mkting.com\/blog\/disease-mongering-and-pharma\/","title":{"rendered":"Disease Mongering and Pharma Credibility"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Disease mongering&#8221; is a term that was coined by the late journalist Lynn Payer to describe what she saw as the confluence of interests by some doctors, drug companies, patient advocacy groups and media in exaggerating the severity of illness and the ability of drugs to &#8220;cure&#8221; them.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.surveymonkey.com\/s.asp?u=753703168563\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Disease Mongering -- Is it real or not?\" src=\"http:\/\/ec2-54-175-84-28.compute-1.amazonaws.com\/pharma-mkting.com\/banners\/DM-banner-468x60.jpg\" border=\"1\" height=\"60\" width=\"468\" \/><\/a><br \/>The following examples of disease mongering were cited in the <a href=\"http:\/\/collections.plos.org\/diseasemongering-2006.php\">April, 2006 issue of PLoS<\/a>:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"font-family: trebuchet ms;font-family:arial;\" >\n<li>Restless Leg Syndrome &#8211; Prevalence of rare condition exaggerated<\/li>\n<li>Irritable Bowel Syndrome &#8211; Promoted as a serious illness needing therapy, when usually a mild problem<\/li>\n<li>Menopause &#8211; Too often medicalised as a disorder when really a normal part of life <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The organization that hosted the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.diseasemongering.org\/\">Inaugural Conference on Disease Mongering<\/a>, produced the following video and distributed it via YouTube. It&#8217;s quite well-done.<\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, there is thin line between &#8220;disease mongering&#8221; and disease awareness advertising and PR (see, for example, &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/pharma-mkting.com\/blog\/2006\/04\/disease-awareness-or-disease-mongering.html\">Disease Awareness or Disease Mongering?<\/a>&#8220;).<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"font-family: trebuchet ms;font-family:arial;\" ><p>&#8220;[Disease Mongering] is exemplified mostly explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry-funded disease awareness campaigns &#8211; more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health.&#8221; &#8211; PLoS<\/p>\n<p>This past Tuesday, Neil H. Gray, Managing Partner, Healthcare Trends &#038; Strategies, LLC, and I put together a &#8220;Point-Counterpoint&#8221; debate on the issues related to disease mongering and pharma credibility at the Patient Education and Disease Awareness Summit in Philadelphia. Neil and I have discussed this topic before in a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talk.pharma-mkting.com\/\">Pharma Marketing Talk<\/a> podcast, which you can listen to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.talk.pharma-mkting.com\/show004.htm\">here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>For the Summit audience, we decided to take opposite sides to debate several questions, including:<\/p>\n<ul style=\"font-family: trebuchet ms;font-family:arial;\" >\n<li>Is it a real issue?<\/li>\n<li>Lack of blockbuster drugs in pipeline a factor?<\/li>\n<li>Influence of DTC advertising<\/li>\n<li>Impact on pharma credibility<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>You can find more details in the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.blog.pharma-mkting.com\/DMandCred.pdf\">PPT presentation here<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>One of the main tenets of disease mongering is that pharmaceutical companies are putting sales potential &#038; profit before patient health when deciding what drugs to develop. A recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers (&#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.pwc.com\/extweb\/pwcpublications.nsf\/docid\/E8A194168C19DE678525726100550B91\">Recapturing the Vision: Restoring Trust in the Pharmaceutical Industry by Translating Expectations into Actions<\/a>&#8220;) showed that consumers and pharmaceutical executives are far apart on what really motivates the drug industry. Take a look at the following chart prepared from survey data:<\/p>\n<p><a onblur=\"try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}\" href=\"http:\/\/bp0.blogger.com\/_ZiPiXEv_Q_g\/Rbi3TbSxhLI\/AAAAAAAAAGw\/AgoFE8t13OM\/s1600-h\/PwC-cred1.jpg\"><img decoding=\"async\" style=\"margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;\" src=\"http:\/\/bp0.blogger.com\/_ZiPiXEv_Q_g\/Rbi3TbSxhLI\/AAAAAAAAAGw\/AgoFE8t13OM\/s320\/PwC-cred1.jpg\" alt=\"\" id=\"BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5023966928703685810\" border=\"0\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"font-family: trebuchet ms;font-family:arial;\" ><p>&#8220;Pharmaceutical companies need to demonstrate a better balance of their primary healthcare mission with their fiduciary obligation to shareholders through patient-focused behavior. Research has shown that a 5 percent positive change in corporate reputation translates into a 3 percent to 5 percent positive change in market capitalization.&#8221; &#8212; Peter Claude, a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers Pharmaceutical and Life Sciences Advisory Services Group<\/p>\n<p>Disease mongering may be just one more nail in the coffin of pharma credibility, but it will become a more important factor as the industry adapts to weak pipelines for new innovative drugs and must find new indications for old drugs.<\/p>\n<p>Survey<br \/>I am interested in your opinion. Please take my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.surveymonkey.com\/s.asp?u=753703168563\">survey<\/a>.  After completing the survey you will be able to see a summary of results (de-identified, excludes open-ended responses and comments that may identify the respondent). You can also use filters to examine results from different subsets of respondents (e.g., pharma company employees vs. non-pharma people, etc.).<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.surveymonkey.com\/s.asp?u=753703168563\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" alt=\"Disease Mongering -- Is it real or not?\" src=\"http:\/\/ec2-54-175-84-28.compute-1.amazonaws.com\/pharma-mkting.com\/banners\/DM-banner-468x60.jpg\" border=\"1\" height=\"60\" width=\"468\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8220;Disease mongering&#8221; is a term that was coined by the late journalist Lynn Payer to describe what she saw as the confluence of interests by some doctors, drug companies, patient advocacy groups and media in exaggerating the severity of illness and the ability of drugs to &#8220;cure&#8221; them. The following examples of disease mongering were [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":13101,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[461,469],"topic":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v22.0 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Disease Mongering and Pharma Credibility - Pharma Marketing Network<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/ec2-54-175-84-28.compute-1.amazonaws.com\/pharma-mkting.com\/blog\/disease-mongering-and-pharma\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Disease Mongering and Pharma Credibility - Pharma Marketing Network\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"&#8220;Disease mongering&#8221; is a term that was coined by the late journalist Lynn Payer to describe what she saw as the confluence of interests by some doctors, drug companies, patient advocacy groups and media in exaggerating the severity of illness and the ability of drugs to &#8220;cure&#8221; them. 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