The pharmaceutical industry has landed in a soup with their unethical acts of popularizing ailments and promoting diseases, coming under the scanner of health activists. The recent years have seen many pharmaceutical companies creating hype around certain ailments, using all the tricks up their sleeves. With the sole motive to boost the sale of their drugs, they make normal people pill-poppers in the process. Drug awareness campaigns, and direct to consumer drug advertising are effective methods to get the evil plans of action and schemes across to the layman. Like fiery prophets delivering a sermon to a zealous crowd of believers, these marketing agents can keep even the most critical minds in a trance, raising doubts, and shaking their strong faith and beliefs to the roots. Female sexual dysfunction (FSD) and erectile dysfunction are hot in the reckoning, while bipolar disorder and attention deficit hyperactive disorder are some of the ailments that need a critical appraisal to demarcate the elements of the natural and the artificial. To put it bluntly, disease-mongering is selling of a disease that broadens the horizon of the illness and grows the market of the particular drug. Erectile dysfunction and its drug Viagra has been prime suspect in a recent conference of health professionals in Australia. Joel Lexchin of the School of Health Policy and Management at York University in Toronto said that Pfizer has been trying to promote Viagra for recreational use and as a lifestyle improver though Viagra is a successful cure for erectile dysfunction due to prostrate surgery or diabetes. Pfizer has been trying to maintain a clean image as far as their ads and promos are concerned. They have used Bob Dole, a senator in his 70s and a 39 year old former Texas Ranger Baseball player as spokesperson. A press statement given by Pfizer UK says, the drug awareness campaigns of Pfizer are meant for educating the health professionals to enable successful treatment of ED, which is a serious ailment. However, the latest Viagra ads seem to carry a different message, giving a hint that, everyone is prone to suffer from some form of erectile set back, at one point of time in life; a slight deviation from a normal erection means ED and a treatment with Viagra. A close study of the age profile of people taking Viagra also points to a disturbing trend, with a sudden and rapid increase of users in the 18 25 years bracket. Certain section of the health community says that as erectile dysfunction is highly prevalent only in men above 40, it might just be a part of the human aging and waning process, and not a metabolic disease as it is established today. They also predict that premature ejaculation is the next in line to be clubbed under the sexual dysfunction category, if the disease-mongering activities of the pharmaceutical industries are not kept in check. But one thing is for sure, disease-mongering or not, Pfizers Viagra is doing roaring business, with many erectile dysfunction patients ready to swear their erection on Viagra. |
