Post No.: 0835
Fluffystealthkitten says:
Businesses often overstate or even concoct problems just so they can market to us the ‘solutions’ that we ‘need’ for them.
Pharmaceutical companies, in particular, have been struggling to find new treatments for the diseases we already and truly have, so they’ve been inventing new ailments for the treatments they’ve discovered!
Or they may be real problems like social anxiety disorder, female sexual dysfunction or night eating syndrome – but not necessarily pharmaceutical issues. Reducing, say, intelligence, libido, shyness or tiredness to ‘pill problems’ can be considered exploitative of the vulnerable, disempowering and distracting from the behavioural or social solutions that are really needed. They may thus misrepresent the true understanding of a problem because they actually involve behavioural or social mechanisms rather than reductionist biopharmaceutical mechanisms.
Pharmaceutical interventions can be more expensive and carry many side-effect risks too. But that’s no worry for these pharmaceutical companies because other pills can be sold to treat these drug side-effects too(!)
It’s like giant tech corporations are mainly the ones who are collecting masses of our personal data. But now these very same companies are trying to present themselves as defenders of our privacy… if only you buy their latest products!
Complex problems usually have complex causes and therefore usually require complex and effortful solutions. But we’re generally drawn to reductionist and ‘biomedicalised’ hopes of remedies. Younger generations are also being raised to think that pills are the go-to solution to everything, including when it comes to improving academic performance. These pills, capsules or tablets can offer a placebo effect, yet it’s still exploitative, disempowering and misleading if so.
They biomedicalise (e.g. blood tests and medications) certain issues that are better understood and solved, with fewer negative side-effects, via psychosocial and lifestyle interventions – like getting more rest, eating family meals together and changing one’s expectations about being happy all of the time. These are things one can do without paying anyone an indefinitely ongoing fee of ‘take two of these every four hours’.
To expand their sales, they’ll falsely claim painkillers with ‘targeted’ pain relief so that consumers think they’ll need to buy separate painkillers for backache, headache, joints and muscles, which can be dangerous because consumers may overdose if they have multiple simultaneous aches. Pharmaceutical companies that sell depression medication distribute online depression questionnaires that prime and ask only questions that make you focus on and think about how miserable your life is, thus increasing the chances of you self-diagnosing that you’re depressed and thus need their medications. The serotonin hypothesis for antidepressants gets more debateable as the years go by too, yet pharmaceutical corporations continue to push them hard and lobby for providing them to as many people as possible.
In some cases, it’s a line-drawing problem. Everyone who has reached adulthood has likely wished for or fantasised about, even if just for a split-second once, someone being dead – so does everyone exhibit ‘traits of psychopathy’ and thus need drugs to curb such thoughts? We all forget things sometimes, or misread things, so do we all suffer from ‘mild amnesia’ or ‘mild dyslexia’? It can be dilemmatic though – if there’s no diagnosis or label, we won’t help true sufferers and will instead blame them for their own lives and outcomes. But we don’t want to over-diagnose conditions either.
Yet the main point is that even with a diagnosis of a mental or physical condition, it doesn’t necessarily mean that drugs are the solution – the solutions can be cultural, social and/or behavioural, whether regarding the individual, or those who interact with them, or probably both (e.g. talking therapies, a better sleep routine or more exercise for the individual, and better education and understanding for society generally).
So we don’t always need medicalised interventions to our problems or ‘problems’ – there can be more effective cultural solutions, like homosexuality doesn’t need ‘curing’, never mind drugs to chemically do so. It just needs accepting and accommodating in a modern and progressive society. What’s ‘normal’ anyway? Should someone who’s different, like with a different skin colour, sexuality or is autistic, need to change – or should society change to accept those who are different and don’t do harm to others or even themselves? Meow.
Now although the culture of medicalising every problem conceivable benefits those making billions from it, there’s no grand ‘Big Pharma’ conspiracy – just the profit maximisation motive at work. They’re not conspiring to suppress natural or alternative remedies while pushing vaccines. (Post No.: 0810 discussed complementary and alternative medicines.) ‘Big Pharma’ isn’t always the bad guy. Developing drugs takes an enormous amount of risk. And many drugs do help lives when they’re for real or serious medical problems. Yet corporations can profiteer shamelessly when they monopolise the market for holding a patent, even when millions of lives are at stake in poorer parts of the world.
A few pharmaceutical or biotechnology giants unnecessarily prolonged the COVID-19 pandemic by putting their own self-interests and profits first – by supplying the richest countries, who were able to pay the most for their vaccines, first rather than distributing them to where they were needed most. Millions of doses for poorer countries failed to be delivered when promised in 2022. Most of those in richer countries had their third or booster jabs and were hoarding extra doses before most of those in the poorest countries had even had their first jab yet. This is the expected free market behaviour in action, which shows that unfettered free market forces can fail to bring the optimum outcome for the world because the longer it takes to get everyone vaccinated, the more time and chance for the virus to mutate into more deadly or contagious variants, and the longer the pandemic will last. But perhaps this is the rational, self-interested plan for these corporations – the longer the pandemic lasts, the more doses will ultimately be sold. New variants will mean more boosters with current vaccines or tweaked vaccines that can be sold.
Several new billionaires have been made in this sector because of the pandemic. Some pharmaceutical companies exercised their patent rights, which prevented others from developing similar drugs – this was despite government/tax-funded scientists and research contributing to their development. This isn’t just about them being partly publicly funded by you and I – this is an invention with a humanitarian purpose. Yet maximising profits have come first for some of these corporations, like Johnson & Johnson and Moderna. (Moderna might opt not to sue any rival until they consider the pandemic is over, but if you develop a similar vaccine to theirs and they suddenly regard the pandemic is over, then your personal investment in developing that drug would be wasted anyway, hence it’s a risk that cannot be taken unless they promise to never ever sue i.e. to relinquish those patents they’ve filed for their mRNA COVID-19 vaccine in various countries around the world, that was possibly co-invented with US government scientists anyway.)
Most vaccines, apart from for influenza, are ‘take once, and maybe a booster or two, over your entire lifetime, unless you’re travelling to particular destinations, are pregnant or have other idiosyncratic requirements’ – which make them relatively less profitable to develop and manufacture despite their benefits to society. Therefore caring governments need to help push vaccines to prevent diseases like measles or polio in communities. But if the rate of decay of protection that COVID-19 vaccines offer is fast and we have to learn to live with the disease then these vaccines will be a continual, big money-spinner for pharmaceutical companies for years to come.
…Consumers are frequently being falsely or incompletely informed without realising it, hence companies that spout marketing spin don’t always get found out; especially if there are powerful corporate-interest lobby groups within an industry and weak external regulations. So just because a firm is large, well-known, long-established and successful, it doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily more reliable and trustworthy.
We mightn’t object to an over-medicalised life though because we want to hear what we want to hear – that there are hopes for easy and quick-fix solutions to our concerns, both serious and superficial. We may be seduced by the technical-sounding spiel that promises so much. We’re less critical of things we want to believe in, like that red wine is good for us if we personally like and consume a lot of red wine, or that there exists these quick-fix detox products that are effective at ‘cleansing us’ thus abusing our bodies most of the rest of the time is fine.
It’s like it’s easier to believe that human activities aren’t accelerating climate change at all, or climate change isn’t a problem whatsoever, if one wants to continue driving one’s petrol or diesel car a lot without guilt.
So the bull**** advertising and PR feeds our own selfish wishes, fantasies and worldviews, which makes it easier to trust them or interpret their messages favourably. Marketing is designed to present the manufacturer as ‘the expert’, with the consumer in a subordinate position of dependence due to being pushed the message of ‘we have this, and you want this, but you can only get this particular thing from us’. And if we fall for it, we’ll feel compelled to purchase their products. So they tap into and exploit people’s insecurities and vulnerabilities, hopes and fears, and profit from them.
You have too many grey hairs, too many skin blemishes, you’re too wrinkly, too ugly… but if you buy this then your insecurities will disappear! But only for a moment. You’ll then need to buy some more. Okay, most health concerns require ongoing care (e.g. brushing your teeth or showering) but the above types of concerns aren’t really diseases on their own.
Another problem with the pharmaceutical industry is that the manufacturers themselves conduct most of the drugs trials, and of course they have a vested interest in showing positive, and only positive, results for their own products. There’s therefore a conflict of interest between telling the complete truth and maximising shareholder value. Some science is ultimately funded by corporations that want to find, or at least twist or cherry-pick, some positive findings for their products. This can be achieved via the publication bias, file drawer problem or sometimes outright fraud.
Are the side-effects worth the benefits overall? Is something cost-effective compared to the alternatives? If something is ‘free from’ or ‘low in’ something undesirable then consider what they’ve substituted this ingredient with? A critical analysis means that we look for both the pros and cons of something, not just the pros or just the cons.
They also decide what gets researched in the first place based on corporate interests. So they mostly don’t bother with trying to find treatments for serious but rare diseases (for this market is small) or diseases that are more common in poorer parts of the world (for these people cannot afford to pay for any treatments). They tend to focus on ‘conditions’ that middle-class people in the world ‘suffer’ from – something that can be patented too in order for them to gain a protectable temporary monopoly (it often isn’t as difficult as one might think to modify an existing molecule a tiny bit until it’s ‘new’). In other words, whatever they think will make them the most money – not whatever will save the most lives or reduce the most suffering.
This is especially because the golden age of finding effective drugs for real diseases seems to have ground to a near halt in recent decades (although mRNA-based therapeutics, for instance, are presently promising). And again treatments are more profitable than cures – everyone wants outright cures for their illnesses but ongoing treatments elicit constant repeat business and therefore maximise profits from the vulnerable. Therefore what’s optimal for the shareholders isn’t always for a business’s customers – their interests aren’t exactly aligned. Maximising profits doesn’t always align with maximising societal well-being – in fact they’re sometimes directly opposed.
Meow!
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