Politics

Branding Diseases to Sell Cures

By Anne Landman

Pharmaceutical companies have mastered the art of "branding" diseases to sell more drugs, according to Carl Elliott, M.D., Ph.D., author of White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine. "Branding" means shaping public perception of a disease to make treatment more appealing to potential patients. Once people are convinced they have a new condition, they will seek treatment on their own, and new drugs will sell themselves. Disease-branding works if conditions can be portrayed either shameful if they are stigmatized. For example, to sell the drug Detrol, Pharmacia re-branded urinary incontinence as "overactive bladder," and used advertising to convince people that they no longer actually have to lose bladder control to have a condition -- they just have to need to go to the bathroom a lot. Neil Wolf, Vice President of Pharmacia, explained how re-branding worked in a 2002 presentation called "Positioning Detrol: Creating a Disease." By making people think they have a new condition called "overactive bladder," the company created a market of 21 million potential patients. Other conditions re-packaged through branding include "social anxiety disorder" (which used to be called "shyness") and "gastro-esphageal reflux disease" (formerly called "heartburn").

Full post as published by PR Watch on October 12, 2010 (boomark / email).