Sexual Disease Mongering?

Tuesday April 11, 2006

To coincide with this week's international conference in Australia on the corporate sponsored creation of disease—referred to as "disease mongering"—the journal Public Library of Science Medicine is publishing eleven articles devoted to how drug companies sell sickness.

Women's health advocate and clinical professor of psychiatry at New York University, Leonore Tiefer, aruges that a perfect example of "disease mongering" is the promotion of female sexual dysfunction (FSD). She points to the often cited, but patently misleading statistic that 43% of women in the US live with female sexual dysfunction (a statistic even the researchers from whose research it was taken say is being used incorrectly).

The journal is open-access and all eleven articles can be read for free on line. Two of the articles focus on sexuality, one on FSD written by Tiefer, and another on Pfizer and the redefinition of erectile dysfunction written by Joel Lexchin, from York University.

Read more - Guardian Unlimited: Drug firms accused of turning healthy people into patients

Read more - Public Library of Science Medicine: Disease Mongering