Condition Branding

CONDITION BRANDING....Shannon Brownlee writes in the Washington Post about "condition branding" in the pharmaceutical industry:

Condition branders use "information" about medical conditions to forge links between disease and treatment in the minds of both patients and doctors. If they have a drug but no condition, they will simply invent a disease.

....One of the best examples is "osteopenia," a diagnosis that millions of women my age are given every year.....Before the 1990s, doctors decided that you had osteoporosis if you were elderly and you broke a bone. When the pharmaceutical company Merck came up with its anti-bone-loss durg Fosamax, it wanted a broader market than just elderly fracture patients. The solution? The company helped fund a panel of medical experts to create diagnostic criteria for osteoporosis so that a diagnosis could be made before the patient actually broke a bone.

The panel's first step was to define "normal" bone density as that of the average 30-year-old woman. Next, the experts chose as their cutoff for osteoporosis a statistical point that was slightly below the bone density of their normal 30-year-old — a definition they admitted was "somewhat arbitrary." Finally, they came up with a completely new disease — osteopenia — for bone density that fell somewhere between that normal 30-year-old and their arbitrary definition of osteoporosis.

Voila — 30 percent of post-menopausal women suddenly had a disease that needed to be treated early in order to prevent a problem — hip fracture — that wouldn't occur for many years, if ever. According to the new guidelines, millions more women now had osteopenia, which their doctors needed to watch like hawks so that their patients could be treated once they progressed to osteoporosis. Merck then took the added step of helping doctors buy DEXA scanners, X-ray machines needed to scan your bones to get that all-important diagnosis.