How Did That Drug Qualify For Market?
© By Lena Sanchez
 
Marketing technique of the drug industry or a real health treatment?
 
What the average person does not comprehend is how drug companies quietly and very subtly start to lobby and familiarize the medical community and the world with a disease before they market a drug to counteract that certain illness/disease!
 
Example; In November 2001 a California firm offering "business intelligence" announced, "43% of all women over 18 experience sexual dysfunction . . . Greater public awareness and acceptance of SD [sexual dysfunction] as a common and treatable disease will heavily influence market growth, predominantly for women." Then in August 2002 a company looking for women to take part in a clinical trial advertised a new drug for "female sexual arousal disorder". The advertisement prominently cited the figures, "43% of all women over 18 experience sexual dysfunction . . . " in its press release.  Almost word for word the news release in November 2001.That release also quoted a Dr Sweeney saying that 40% of women have the dysfunction in one form or another, "but not all have the most severe form of the disease."  Nobody had ever heard of SD as a disease prior to that...
 
One of the milestones in the beginning of marketing that disorder was a JAMA article in February 1999 titled "Sexual dysfunction in the United States: prevalence and predictors."  Two of the authors of "Sexual dysfunction  in the United States: prevalence and predictors.", later admitted to close ties to Pfizer Pharmaceuticals (aka Business Intelligence), said that for women aged 18-59, the "total prevalence of sexual dysfunction" was 43%, a figure picked up by the a subtle release to the news media and medical community now widely cited in both scientific and lay media as gospel truth.
 
First let's see how 43% was decided on!
 
A University of Chicago sociology professor Ed Laumann and colleagues reanalyzed a slice of data from a 1992 survey and came up with serious questions about the 43% figure so aptly bantered about these days. That figure came from a study of around 1500 women who were asked to answer yes or no to whether they had experienced any of seven problems, for two months or more, during the previous year, including a lack of desire for sex or anxiety about sexual performance, and difficulties with vaginal lubrication. If the women answered yes to just one of the seven questions, they were included in a group characterized as having SD (sexual dysfunction). No mention of what time of the month or what circumstances led up to their answer was asked or noted.
 
The JAMA article stated that its data was "not equivalent to clinical diagnosis," yet that note was overlooked, and some leading sex researchers have raised serious concerns about the figure's constant misuse. 
 
One of those concerned was Dr Sandra Leiblum, professor of psychiatry at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School and a clinical psychologist. She believes real dysfunction is much less prevalent than 43%, and that the figure has contributed to an over medicalization of women's sexuality, where changes in sexual desire, from time to time, is the norm. "I think there is dissatisfaction and perhaps disinterest among a lot of women, but that doesn't mean they have a disease," she stated during an interview at a New York educational workshop.
 
The director of the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, Dr John Bancroft, believes the term "dysfunction" is highly misleading, and he is one of several researchers critical of the corporate sponsored 1998 definition. He argues that an inhibition of sexual desire is in many situations a healthy and functional response for women faced with stress, tiredness, or threatening patterns of behavior from their partners. "The danger of portraying sexual difficulties as a dysfunction is that it is likely to encourage doctors to prescribe drugs to change sexual function when the attention should be paid to other aspects of the woman's life. It's also likely to make women think they have a malfunction when they do not."
 
Laumann defends his use of the term "dysfunction" but concedes that many women among his 43% are "perfectly normal" and that a lot of their problems "arise out of perfectly reasonable responses of the human organism to challenges and stress."
 
Could this all be another ploy by the pharmaceutical company to come up with a disease to fit a drug they are working on and about to release? Exactly what it is!
 
This too happened with Viagra before it was released, it has happened with other drugs many times in the past and continues to happen as the drug companies come up with more drugs.
 
Vioxx - arthritic drug - was removed from market yet immediately thereafter a small blurb (Oct. 14, 2004) appeared in newspapers and on some TV news that Merck had a new arthritis medication in the works. So Arcoxia followed Vioxx yet is the same COX-2! Do I believe it will be better than Vioxx? NO! How can the same type of drug be better?
 
How about the commercials of the past, and premenstrual gals in the department store dressing rooms trying on clothes and the bloating they were experiencing and then it moved to the nasty outbursts and the term PMDD (Premenstrual Dysphoric Disorder)... The ads for Serafem coming out shortly after those ads appeared for a so-called PMDD disorder. Serafem being nothing more than the very dangerous antidepressant drug Prozac repackaged in lavender pink, marketed to women for PMDD. I like what the late Nicholas Regush, health investigative reporter's question in regards to the FDA approving Serafem. "Were members of its advisory committee suffering emotionally from Pre-BS Affliction (PBSA) when they approved Sarafem/Prozac for PMDD?"  I would like to add that they are still suffering from PBSA. You know the term BS (animal feces)?
 
As early as two to five years prior to release, the occurrence of "informational" meetings and speeches spouting the latest diagnoses begin bombarding the medical world. All set up to get a new classified disease and their drug paid for by insurance companies and recognized by the medical community. These meetings are published as "informational" by the news media. Informational? Like a fox turned loose in a chicken house!!!
 
Those meetings are all a forerunner of a new disease that will shortly have a HCFA and ICD9 numbers for billing insurances. I've watched it happen over and over for years now and even attended a workshop or two ? before retiring from the medical office - paid for by a pharmaceutical company working on a coining a new disease/illness with a medication released within months to two years later!
 
There are always a few people who see through their smoke screens and try to call them on it but usually lose in the attempt to thwart the pharmaceutical industry's goal of billions of dollars in their pockets! Those thwarted are labeled as cracked or labeled as troublemakers by the big pharma world.

Pay close attention to your diagnosis and prescription.
Lena
 
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