- Promotion of anxiety about future ill-health in healthy individuals
- Inflated disease prevalence rates
- Promotion of aggressive drug treatment of milder symptoms and diseases
- Introduction of questionable new diagnoses—such as PMDD or social anxiety disorder—that are hard to distinguish from normal life
- Redefinition of diseases in terms of surrogate outcomes (i.e., osteoporosis becomes a disease of low bone density rather than fragility fractures)
- Promotion of drugs as a first-line solution for problems previously not considered medical, such as disruptive classroom behaviour or problematic sexual relationships.
The rationale for regulation of drug promotion is health protection, encouragement of appropriate medicine use, and prevention of deceptive advertising. The European community code on medicinal products for human use states that advertising of medicinal products “must encourage the rational use of the product and may not be misleading” [ 34]. Canada's Food and Drugs Act prohibits advertising of a drug that is “false, misleading or deceptive or is likely to create an erroneous impression regarding its character, value, quantity, merit or safety” [ 35]. The World Health Organization's Ethical Criteria for Medicinal Drug Promotion states that advertisements, “…should not take undue advantage of people's concern for their health” [ 36].
Disease mongering by definition creates erroneous impressions of the condition a product aims to treat and the merit and safety of treatment, and frequently provokes undue anxiety or exaggerates prevalence rates.http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1434509/?tool=pubmed
