In 2005 Rai 3 aired the documentary “Inventors of diseases”, an investigation by the journalist Silvestro Montanaro on the deep links between pharmaceutical companies and business. The journalistic investigation is an accurate study of the logic of modern drug production and the mechanisms underlying the economic model of Big Pharma, finance.
The goal of producing and generating profits, explains the documentary, has in fact transformed pharmaceutical companies into companies tout court. The marketing it becomes the first item of expenditure with appropriations well above those of the research itself. Big Pharma’s first purpose is defined as the achievement of sales goals: the goods are the drugs, the patients become the customers.
The intertwining of financial dynamics with that of pharmaceutical production has led to a further step in commercial strategies, now the medicine is no longer to be sold but the cause of its production and administration, the illness. It is the cd Disease mongering, the systematic marketing of the pathology itself.
“The biggest market for drugs is healthy people,” he explains Marcia Angell, American doctor and the first female editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine “their goal is to sell as many medications to healthy people or people with small and insignificant ailments. To do this they sell more the illness that the drug, convincing healthy people, who constitute a huge market, that they have a disease that must be treated “.
The disease mongering (“go to the doctor as you go to the baker“) Taken to extremes leads to the creation of new diseases in order to be able to sell drugs by pharmaceutical companies. Thus simple disturbances or sensations are transformed into real ones pathologies to take care of. “Real syndromes and pathologies are invented” underlines Alessandro Meluzzi “perhaps forgotten within a couple of years. There is nothing better than treating the healthy “.
Alessandro Meluzzi e Fabio Duranti comment on the second part of the documentary “Inventors of diseases”
WATCH ▷ LINK PART 1
WATCH ▷ LINK PART 3
WATCH ▷ INVENTORS OF DISEASES [IL DOCUMENTARIO COMPLETO]