Life can be hard. Sometimes you feel sad or distracted or anxious.
Or maybe you feel a compelling urge to move your legs.
But does that mean you are sick? Does it mean you
need medication?
Maybe, maybe not. For some people, symptoms are severe enough to
be disabling. But for many others with milder problems, these “symptoms” are just the transient experiences of
everyday life. Helping sick people get treatment is a good thing.
Convincing healthy people that they are
sick is not. Sick people stand to benefit from treatment, but healthy people may only get hurt: they get labeled “sick,”
may become anxious about their condition, and, if they are treated, may experience side effects that overwhelm any potential
benefit.
“Disease mongering” is the effort by pharmaceutical companies
(or others with similar financial interests) to enlarge the market for a treatment by convincing people that they are sick
and need medical intervention.
Typically, the disease is vague, with nonspecific symptoms
spanning a broad spectrum of severity—from everyday experiences many people would not even call “symptoms,”
to profound suffering.
The market for treatment gets enlarged in two ways: by narrowing the definition of
health so normal experiences get labeled as pathologic, and by expanding the definition of disease to include earlier, milder,
and presymptomatic forms (e.g., regarding a risk factor such as high cholesterol as a disease in itself).
What Is Restless Legs Syndrome?
The diagnosis of restless legs syndrome requires
the presence of the following four criteria:
- An urge to move the legs due to an unpleasant feeling in the legs.
- Onset
or worsening of symptoms when at rest or not moving around frequently.
- Partial or complete
relief by movement (e.g., walking) for as long as the movement continues.
- Symptoms that occur
primarily at night and that can interfere with sleep or rest.
The severity of disease
is judged by the frequency of these symptoms, which can range from less than once a month to many times a day.
Recommended treatments include stretching exercises and less caffeine for intermittent disease and various prescription
drugs (e.g., benzodiazepines and dopamine agonists) for daily symptoms.
Discussions about disease mongering usually focus on the role of pharmaceutical companies—how they promote disease
and their products through “disease awareness” campaigns and direct-to-consumer drug advertising, and by funding
disease advocacy groups.
But diseases also get promoted in another way: through the news media. News reports
are a major source of health information for people.
Unless journalists approach stories
about new diseases skeptically and look out for disease mongering by the pharmaceutical industry, pharmaceutical consultants,
and advocacy groups, journalists, too, may end up selling sickness.
