disease mongering
Inventing health scares
Disease mongering is the practice of expanding the boundaries of illness to grow markets for treatments—pharmaceutical companies promoting awareness of conditions that are mild, rare, or arguably not diseases at all.
The term implies that normal human variation or minor discomforts get reframed as medical problems requiring intervention: Critics accused the drugmaker of disease mongering when it funded campaigns about "restless legs syndrome".
The practice blurs the line between legitimate health education and marketing.
- pathologizationFraming as illness
- medicalizeReframe as medical problem
- overdiagnosisFinding harmless conditions unnecessarily
- pharmaceutical industryBusiness of creating medications
- drug repsPharmaceutical sales representatives
overtreatment · pill for every ill · junk science · market expansion · quackery · exploitation · media sensationalism · health scares · ask your doctor · marketing · consumer protection laws · fearmongering · drugs · whistleblower protections · hypochondria · awareness campaigns · scare tactics · overmedication
- Overdiagnosisovertesting, overtreatment, overscreening, overprescription, overprescribing
disease mongeringevidence-based medicine
Clinical care guided by research
public health education · patient-centered care · medical ethics · informed consent · healthcare ethics
disease mongeringpublic health education
Teaching populations about wellness
ease, disease, diseased, diseases, monger, mongering, medicalization