How the media helps make us sick!
By Shadrach on Jun 12, 2006 in Dog Health - Immune System, Dog News
Arrrooo fellow pets and humans! Ever wonder why even just a few years ago (probably before I was born) how there didn’t seem to be as many diseases? Mom says that when she was growing up, there weren’t hardly any pets that got sick except for accidents. That’s bepaws they were fed natural stuff. Like the dogs got all the raw fat, bones and scrap meat (and so did the cats), and the rabbits or guinea pigs got all the scrap salad makings, etc. Then Big Pharma came along or rather they discovered what a gold mine there was in diseases, so they started inventing diseases. Then they got the doctors and insurance on board with them, and then the media got into this three-ring circus. Deep pockets, lots of money and NO health. It’s all about keeping everyone sick and selling LOTS of pills, WOOF! Don’t believe me, well read this:
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Disease mongering Restless Legs Syndrome: A case study of how the media helps make people sick (PLoS Medicine)
by Steven Woloshin and Lisa M. Schwartz
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 [2]. 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). keep on reading this enlightening expose
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Have a pawsitively tail waggin’, healthy, pharmless day, WOOF!
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