1+1=3
This week the British Medical Journal published our editorial calling for a new social health movement to challenge the “Selling of Sickness.” The time has come for a movement using a partnership model that combines ...
CALL TO ACTION ON SELLING SICKNESS GOES INTERACTIVE
Our Call to Action went live on April 22, 2013, and as of this moment, 2 weeks later, we have 278 individual endorsers from all over the world, with more signing every day. Our editorial ...
WHO CAN WE TRUST?
A new study just published in the Journal of General Internal Medicine involving Canadian, US and French physicians shows that the majority of family doctors receive little or no information about a drug’s harmful side ...
“YOUR VOICE, YOUR WISH” – A NEW MARKETING SCAM ABOUT WOMEN’S SEXUALITY
Following the FDA’s 2010 rejection of flibanserin, the ineffective and possibly dangerous CNS drug proposed for “female sexual dysfunction (FSD)” and the 2nd FSD drug to fail at the FDA, the International Society for the ...
DSM-5 PETITIONS
Next month is the long-awaited debut of the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association, the DSM-V (now known as DSM-5, a change which is odd since even football ...
CONFERENCES, CONFERENCES, AND MORE CONFERENCES
Earlier this week I (KW) was invited to Washington to attend “Using Comparative Effectiveness Research to Improve Health Care” sponsored by Consumer Reports and National Research Center for Women and Families. It brought together over ...
FIRST ROAD TEST
I (LT) just gave a workshop about “Selling Sickness, 2013″ at the annual meeting of the Association for Women in Psychology (AWP), held this weekend in sunny Salt Lake City, Utah. A lively group turned ...
WE DID IT! YOU DID IT! NEXT STEPS?
It seems self-serving to say that the Selling Sickness conference was a blockbuster, but it was. Attended by around 225 advocates, academics, journalists, health care providers, legislators, students, lawyers, librarians, writers From Russia, Finland, Germany, ...
WHAT DO YOU CALL A PERSON WHO HAS A COMPULSION TO GET LYMPHOMA OVER AND OVER AGAIN?…. A LYMPHOMANIAC!
OK, now, don’t get upset. The lymphomaniac joke is from a cancer patients’ website and this blog is about the uses of humor in activism. So take a deep breath and unbutton your mind a ...
RESPONDING TO REPROACHES, REBUKES, AND REBUTTALS
Boldly challenging disease-mongering (DTCA, PhRMA, FDA, accountability, clinical guidelines, transparency, RCT, validity, misleading marketing, etc.) will inevitably produce angry and dismissive reactions and rebukes from pharmaceutical companies and others with vested interests in selling sickness. ...
GOODBYE HEALTH, HELLO “HEALTH”
Anthropologist Joe Dumit has written one of the most important and radical (getting to the root) books about health, marketing, medical research, and the pharmaceutical industry in recent decades, Drugs for Life: How pharmaceutical companies ...
GOOD GRIEF. YOU’RE NOT OVER IT YET?
I (K.W) can’t believe that it’s been 10 years since my funny young husband, Woody, died as a result of Zoloft-induced suicide. It’s been a long journey learning to live with a new “normal.” Only ...
CALL TO ACTION ON DISEASE MONGERING
From the outset of our planning, we wanted our conference to be part of a progressive and activist health movement. The previous Selling Sickness conferences (Australia, 2006; Amsterdam, 2010) brought together scholars who brilliantly unpacked ...
HTTP://ALLTRIALS.NET – WE’VE ONLY JUST BEGUN
A public petition went up on alltrials.net today asking for support (from anybody) for the demand to register all clinical trials for all medical treatments, past and present, and to make sure that the full ...
HAPPY NEW YEAR
It’s hard to believe that our “Selling Sickness 2013: People Before Profits” conference is less than two months away. It seems like just yesterday that I (K.W.) attended the 2010 Selling Sickness conference in Amsterdam. ...
THE PERVERSION OF CHOICE
Iona Heath, past president of the UK Royal College of General Practictitioners and an early supporter and advisor for this conference, wrote a column in the 31 October 2009 BMJ titled: The Perversion of Choice. ...
MAKING THE CONFERENCE PROGRAM
Leonore flew out to Minneapolis this past weekend so she and Kim could sit at a big table with all the bits and pieces of program and finally put it all together. We’ve been speaking ...
TIME TO BAN DIRECT-TO-CONSUMER PRESCRIPTION DRUG MARKETING
This title comes from a 2007 editorial by Kurt Stange in the Annals of Family Medicine but the heartfelt sentiment comes from many, many reformers working in the field of healthcare. Read Stange’s review of the biases ...
COLLECTIVE WISDOM
Earlier this month I (K.W.) attended the Consumers Union’s Safe Patient Project summit at Consumer Reports headquarters in Yonkers, NY. Over 31 talented advocates from 17 states came to learn, network and share ideas about ...
FEMINIST CRITICS OF SEXUOPHARMACEUTICALS ARE “FRIGID COLD FISH”
I got really excited today when Susan Davis, a Melbourne physician who has conducted umpteen clinical trials trying to find a testosterone treatment for women with sexual complaints that will work better than placebo (keep ...
MEDICAL DEVICES UNDER SCRUTINY
Overtreatment, overmarketing, conflicts-of-interest and all the trappings of disease-mongering pertain not just to medical treatments, education, publishing, screening and drugs, but, increasingly, to medical devices, both the kind that are used IN the body and ...
UNEXPECTED RECESS
It’s been a rough week in the Big Apple. I’ve lived in New York City most of my life, through hurricanes and blizzards, terrorist attacks and tourist invasions, not to mention regular teacher/sanitation/transportation/newspaper union strikes, ...
DEPRESCRIBING
A pillar of future professional and lay health education that incorporates disease-mongering awareness must deal with how to discontinue drugs when they are no longer wanted (ineffective, causing adverse reactions, interacting deleteriously with other drugs), ...
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE WITH A MENTAL HEALTH SCREENING TOOL
I (K.W.) recently went to the gynecologist for my annual exam. The office gave me the usual paperwork, but this time I noticed something new — a checklist about my mental health. It asked, “Over ...
DISEASE-MONGERING MEETS THE MENINGITIS SCANDAL
The meningitis outbreak caused by contaminated medicine from a Massachusetts compounding pharmacy has become a full-fledged health scandal with its inevitable elements: avoidable deaths, journalistic outrage, competing investigations, finger-pointing, newly discovered conflicts of interest/incompetence/corruption, resignations, ...
NEW NORMALITIES
“Valium’s Contribution to the New Normal,” an opinion piece in the New York Times this week by longtime health writer Robin Marantz Henig, reviewed the public’s embrace of new expectations for mental equilibrium following the ...
“PATIENT” IS THE NEW BUZZWORD
Everyone seems to be talking about “patients” these days. It’s the word du jour. The drug industry says patients are their reason for being in business. National disease advocacy groups represent the voices of their ...
GENE MYTHS AT THE DISEASE-MONGERING FRONTIER?
It’s obvious to many how Big Pharma contributes to overtreatment, overdiagnosis, misleading marketing (i.e., Disease-Mongering). But what about Big Biotech? Case in point: Direct-to-Consumer Genetic Testing. How about sex selection to achieve a “balanced family“? Have ...
PINTEREST — THE LATEST SOCIAL MEDIA TOOL BEING USED BY PHARMA
Why am I not surprised to see that pharma is increasingly using Pinterest, the social photo-sharing website to reach millions of monthly online visitors. Drug companies are marketers. Plain and simple. They are using all ...
METAPHORS AND MONGERING
Another new study showing that organically raised food is NOT more healthy or nutritious has predictably caused a firestorm of objection. Marion Nestle, my favorite evidence-based food scientist, blogs about this brilliantly from New York. ...
HEAR THE PEOPLE COMMENT ON OVERTREATMENT
The New York Times health columnist, Tara Parker-Pope, is focusing on overtreatment in her contributions to “The Agenda,” a blog following the major issues of the election: Economy, World, Health, Security, Planet (I guess that’s ...
THE MEANING BEHIND THE LOGO
What is the Selling Sickness 2013 logo saying? We thought long and hard about how to communicate our goal for the spirit of this conference, not just our antipathy towards disease mongering. Pills or other ...
OVERDIAGNOSIS IN THE NEWS: WATCH OUT FOR DISEASE CREEP
Every week seems to bring important news about overdiagnosis, either in terms of medical guidelines, scientific papers, investigative revelations, or whistleblower disclosure. The big news this week (so far!) has to do with the “management” ...
WELCOME TO OUR BLOG – SUBMIT YOUR CONFERENCE PROPOSAL SOON
This is Leonore Tiefer starting off our conference blog from New York. There are already many wonderful blogs and books and videos about disease-mongering – overdiagnosis, overtreatment, overmarketing, overmedicalization, conflicts of interest – and we ...
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