Disease Mongering

Bhanuka Kumarasamysarma Disease Awareness Campaigns 29 January 2018

Disease Mongering

Disease mongering is converting simple symptoms to being a cause to a huge disease

or changing someone’s mind to believe that their personal problems are actually medical and that they can recover by taking the medications made by a drug company. New drugs are tested on healthy people according to Gilbert D. A way to protect this could be to look up about the symptoms advised by whoever did so and by checking for other main symptoms first.

There isn’t a way to completely stop it but there is a way we can reduce really bad cases such as a disease awareness campaign being funded by the company that makes the drugs for the disease because this will lower the chance of the charities lying to make more people donate money or buy the drug thinking they have the disease.

A good example of this would be the ADHD Campaign in October 2017. This campaign was funded by Shire which is the drug company that makes the medication Adderall for ADHD. This medicine was promoted everywhere but the medicine actually causes numerous side ef- fects such as aggression and depression. In the worst case it has left people psychotic. This shows that many people could be told that tiredness is a symptom of ADHD when it’s not so they would end up taking Adderall when is one of the harmful types of drugs if misused.

It could be suggested that, disease mongering is happening in campaigns and that they should be prevented because a drug should be handled with care and the public should be re- ceiving the correct treatment. Not only that information that is researched by drug companies should be replaced by independent information for the safety of public. This should be done to ensure that when for example drug companies are researching the symptoms they could bluff and say that a normal headache could be an important symptom when the person only has a headache because of high levels of alcohol consumption. This could lead to the person taking medication for a disease he or she doesn’t even have and could lead to worse side effects. In conclusion I think that drug companies should not be sponsoring disease awareness cam- paigns because the information will not be 100% trustworthy as the drug company would most likely care about the income of the company from the drugs they are making.