Disease Mongering

[Guest guest]

Someone sent me an URL for an upcoming conference in Austrialia

on Disease Mongering. Looks interesting. URL at end.

 

Alobar

 

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A Provocative Symposium on the Selling of Sickness

 

The ascendancy of market logic has both expanded and legitimised the

commercialisation of medicine. In the pharmaceutical sector,

competitive enterprise dominates not only the development of drugs

-and increasingly their diffusion - but also the very definitions of

the illnesses they are used to treat.

 

Industry capacity for innovation, essential for sustaining high

profitability, has arguably extended beyond the invention of novel

products to the creation of new illnesses, disorders and dysfunction,

and the expansion of old ones. Using informal alliances with physician

and patient groups, and with the assistance of public relations

experts, drug companies now 'brand' conditions just as they brand

medicines.

 

Contentiously characterised as 'disease-mongering' by the late Lynn

Payer many marketing strategies appear to be about selling sickness in

order to sell drugs. Examples of disorders that have been represented

in this way are as diverse as male and female erectile dysfunction,

social anxiety disorder, alopecia, and irritable bowl. No-one

questions that some individuals suffering from these 'conditions'

experience genuine morbidity. The 'disorders' are also difficult to

define and quantify, tend to be chronic and in some cases seem to

represent normal human variation or the predictable but undesired

effects of ageing.

 

In the lead up to this global symposium we are commissioning a series

of thoughtful academic and accessible discussion papers that will

assay the role of marketing in contemporary medical practice, and

attempt to understand and challenge the phenomenon of

disease-mongering.

 

The conference will be organized around a mixture of plenary, parallel

and small group sessions. The aims of the conference are to review a

range of examples of disease-mongering, to develop a common view on

the character and magnitude of the problems created by

disease-mongering, to develop some position statements and a research

agenda that will lead to collaborative projects.

Themes

 

1. A taxonomy of disease-mongering; understanding through classification

2. A contemporary case study: the selling of bi-polar disorder

3. Nothing new under the sun- a historical perspective on the

selling of sickness- from medicalisation to disease-mongering

4. The psychology of disease-mongering- do disease-awareness

campaigns make some people sick?

5. The role of health professionals - is this about power or money?

6. The role of patient groups- genuine advocacy or corporate allies?

7. The role of the spin industry- exposing and confronting the

silent mind-changers in global PR

8. The role of the media - what role does media play in

disease-mongering, and how might that change?

9. The role of government - how might disease-mongering be regulated?

10. Independent disease-definition strategies- what are the

alternatives to the current model of entangled panels constantly

expanding disease definitions?

 

http://www.diseasemongering.org/content/program.jsp