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Quotes about Disease Mongering from the world's top natural health / natural living authors

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"When you should be reassured but instead are taught to fear, that's disease mongering. None of this is new. Your parents and grandparents confronted medicalization and disease mongering. For these past generations, orgasm and thinness were medicalized. Today, both are normal, while lack of orgasm and chunki-ness are medicalized. As you will learn in chapter 13, at the turn of the twentieth century Sylvester Graham had invented his cracker, John Harvey Kellogg his corn flakes, Franz Mesmer his magnets and hypnotism, A. T. Still the osteopathy, D. D." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.) "Neither camp is above disease mongering. How about some reality testing? The death rate is one per person and the time of death is set near to your eighty-fifth birthday. Any claim to a science that offers a path to longevity beyond eighty-five years is fatuous. The best we can expect is to arrive at our eighty-fifth birthday feeling reasonably well, even healthful, regardless of our burden of disease. Modern medicine has something to contribute to our quest for longevity thus defined, but not much and certainly not as much as we are told. This reality is discussed in detail in chapter 1." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.) "Your parents and grandparents confronted medicalization and disease mongering. For these past generations, orgasm and thinness were medicalized. Today, both are normal, while lack of orgasm and chunki-ness are medicalized. As you will learn in chapter 13, at the turn of the twentieth century Sylvester Graham had invented his cracker, John Harvey Kellogg his corn flakes, Franz Mesmer his magnets and hypnotism, A. T. Still the osteopathy, D. D. Palmer the chiropractic, Mary Baker Eddy Christian Science, and so much more." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.) "I've been privileged to interact with a number of journalists over the past decade and to watch the gentle evolution of their approach to issues in medicalization and disease mongering. Lynn Payer set the precedent. The likes of Gina Kolata of the New York Times, John Carey of BusinessWeek, and freelancers such as Susan Dominus, Betsy Agnvall, and Paula Dranov are all notable for their willingness to see, to learn, and to speak out." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"Critics (like Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath or David Henry - a professor of clinical pharmacology) call it "selling sickness" or "disease mongering." They talk about "widening the boundaries of treatable illness in order to expand markets for those who sell and deliver treatments."40 They talk about the systematic medicalisation; they talk about turning "ordinary ailments into medical problems, seeing mild symptoms as serious, treating personal problems as medical." There are complete sales strategies, which go along with this. One strategy: involving the media, who like to create fear." - Kenneth W Thomas, Ron Gilbert, Gerd Schaller, Side Effects: The Hidden Agenda of the Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (Get the book.)

"It turns out that MoDed, as any reasonably intelligent reader would ascertain, was a spoof, created by a group of enterprising journalists and academics—who clearly did not suffer from MoDed—at a conference on "disease mongering." And The British Medical Journal, which has a tradition of running humorous pieces in its April i issue, went along with it. But the joke was not universally appreciated, apparendy; a number of respectable news oudets picked up the news release and published stories of the sensational new disorder "without a hint of skepticism." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"The practice of "disease mongering" by the drug industry is promoting non-existent illnesses or exaggerating minor ones for the sake of profits, according to a set of essays published by the open-access journal Public Library of Science Medicine. The special issue, edited by David Henry, of Newcastle University in Australia, and Ray Moynihan, an Australian journalist, reports that conditions such as female sexual dysfunction, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and "restless legs syndrome" have been promoted by companies hoping to sell more of their drugs." - Dr David W Tanton, Ph.D., Antidepressants, Antipsychotics, And Stimulants - Dangerous Drugs on Trial (Get the book.)

"Burton B, Rowell A. disease mongering. . scrutiny of the research, and knowing that all the results had been peer reviewed, it restrained criticism of study results to superficial throwaway arguments. One of the most focused lines of attack was to try and make clearer 'real risk'. PR companies and front organisations constantly repeated the argument, 'We have to get back to speaking in plain language, in actual numbers and not percentages." - Martin J. Walker, HRT Licensed to Kill and Maim: The Unheard Voices of Women Damaged by Hormone Replacement Therapy (Get the book.)

"It's simple, Big Pharma's justifications for the machine behind disease mongering are all false. Direct to consumer advertising just confuses patients into asking for drugs they don't need. The doctors, conned by false claims in medical journals blindly prescribe the unneeded medication. The medical journals themselves rely too much on pharmaceutical advertising dollars to question the ethics of allowing unproven, unscientific advertising claims to appear in scientific journals. The result? Stock prices keep climbing, profits keep growing and CEOs get wealthier." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.) "As you are learning throughout this book, the players in this system of medicine engage in unethical, harmful, and often criminal behavior to protect their profit margins and to keep the investors on Wall Street happy, including: *•* The invention and marketing of fictitious diseases ("disease mongering") in order to convince people they're sick and sell them needless prescription drugs. «•* The outright censorship of life-saving health information that the public desperately needs to make better health choices and prevent chronic disease." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.) "Without the brand pushing, disease mongering, and fraudulent health claims made in such advertising, most consumers would never be interested in the drugs. Today, direct-to-consumer advertising has become an embarrassment to the scientific community and one of the greatest examples of the Big Pharma / FDA conspiracy designed to exploit the public for maximum profits, regardless of who is harmed in the process. See www.StopDrugAds.org to learn more about the grassroots effort to ban direct-to-consumer drug advertising." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.) "Durk Pearson, First Amendment Freedom Award Recipient, 2002 That's why what you hold in your hands right now is the most dangerous information in the world for conventional medicine, because it describes a world where we don't need the drugs, the surgeries, the disease mongering, the fictitious psychiatric disease, and chemical lobotomies, the censorship of real cures, the prevention of prevention, and the utter ignorance that reign as King in modern medicine today. The Emperor of conventional medicine has no clothes. And it's about time that someone finally stood up and said so." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.)

"In any event, both reporters and readers need to be alert to the potential for disease mongering as they consider health news. Journalists should routinely question (and preferably avoid) corporate-sponsored material on the prevalence or impact of a disease. A related concern is creating the appearance that there's no alternative to some new technology News accounts often fail to describe older, less expensive treatments that may be equally effective for many patients. In some cases, they fail to note that patients may have an excellent prognosis without treatment at all." - Richard A. Deyo M.D. M.P.H., Donald L. Patrick, Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises (Get the book.) "This is less a problem with national networks or newspapers like The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, but is often a major concern with local outlets. "Disease Mongering" Sometimes the media distort the magnitude or the severity of a medical problem, or fail to note that it can often be self-limiting. How many stories on back pain, for example, point out that the vast majority of cases get better on their own?" - Richard A. Deyo M.D. M.P.H., Donald L. Patrick, Hope or Hype: The Obsession with Medical Advances and the High Cost of False Promises (Get the book.)

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