I wasn’t sure with all your bold and italics whether you were actually agreeing with what I said in my blog post or whether you thought my words were not credible simply because they were not published by Mayo or in a book.

In summary, I was not attempting to be derogatory towards either side: healthcare industry or patient advocates, simply to show that there are health problems and then there are health problems.

Which elicited a nice response from the author, Bruce Friedman:

Sorry for the confusion. I did not disagree with any of your points about medicalization. I thought that your treatment of the subject was very well balanced and fair. I liked your use of the term “mongering” so much that I extended its use in another blog note to the topic of medical devices

Bruce is the Active Emeritus Professor of Pathology at the University of Michigan Medical School in Ann Arbor, so it was rather gratifying to hear from him.

In response I was keen to emphasise my stance:

I thought the use of the phrase disease mongering was quite well known/worn these days but wanted to use it to show how some people feel about medicalization. The former has negative connotations in the modern context (despite it really meaning seller) whereas medicalisation sounds like marketspeak.

To both Davids, you have points positive, in my opinion

At the moment, the marketers seem clearly ascendant and, in the absence of regulatory action, the resulting problems (as outlined in your write-up) will only worsen. Yes, medicalization can play a useful role in publicizing unrecognized but treatable conditions, but the societal harm caused by making problems out of ordinary conditions of life far outweighs the benefits in my book.

My particular target is TV drug advertising. The average person is not equipped to deal with the one-sided ad description of both symptoms and treatment benefits, even if they are competent critical thinkers, because both disease detection and drug therapy are complex, fact-based problems. Yet, drugs are sold and conditions medicalized by marketers who know full well that health care for most first-world people is an aspect of life that is not price or competition driven, as with most consumer products. If someone is ill, or can be convinced they are ill, they will get treatment regardless of cost. This is a marketer’s dream!

There are still plenty of legitimate, unsolved disease and condition problems out there for the pharmaceutical industry to attack. They should not be creating new social anxieties, under the pretext of a paternal concern for our health, through questionable and, in my view, unethical advertising.

But in the end, I think that Christopher Ervin is correct.