ARE DRUGS companies making us think diseases are more common and more serious than they really are? A senior executive quoted in the British Medical Journal believes so—and he says it’s the marketing people who are responsible.
Fred Nadjarian, managing director of Roche Australia, says: “The marketing people always beat [hype] these things up.” He gives the example of social phobia, a disorder Roche planned to treat with the antidepressant moclobemide in the 1990s. A media release sponsored by Roche at the time announced that more than a million Australians suffered from this “soul destroying” psychiatric disorder. But Nadjarian now says social phobia cannot be that common, because when Roche tried…
