From the article: The Marketing of Fear.

[MiaLee]

From the article: The Marketing of Fear.

The importance of moving away from reliance on corporate sponsored material about the nature or prevalence of disease is important to keep in mind as you assess a diagnosis of osteopenia or osteoporosis based on a dexa scan, and your options to take care of your body:

Osteoporosis Australia, a medical foundation, which has received funding from pharmaceutical companies, issued a press release recently urging people to take a one minute test for their risk of osteoporosis.20According to the foundation, “we call this disease a silent thief: if you're not vigilant, it can sneak up on you and snatch your quality of life and your long-term health.” An accompanying 10 point checklist suggests that merely being a menopausal woman was enough to justify a trip to the doctor to be tested for this disease. The construction of the widely used WHO diagnostic criteria is such that large numbers of healthy women at menopause will automatically be diagnosed as having this “disease” because their bones are being compared with those of much younger women.

Against a background of controversy over disease definition, poor predictive value of bone density measurement, and heavily advertised expensive therapies offering marginal benefits to menopausal women, corporate backed promotional activities are attempting to persuade millions of healthy women worldwide that they are sick.

As a practical step, we suggest that health professionals, policy makers, journalists, and consumers move away from reliance on corporate sponsored material about the nature or prevalence of disease. Genuinely independent sources of information about health problems could replace those skewed towards making the maximum numbers of healthy people feel sick.

Just as researchers from the Cochrane Collaboration are generating systematic evaluations of the best evidence about therapies, a similar effort may be required in evaluating and/or producing unbiased information about illness—starting with those conditions most prone to disease mongering. Independent lay involvement is crucial to produce accurate, comprehensive, and accessible materials.

The public is entitled to know about the controversy surrounding disease definitions and about the self limiting and relatively benign natural course of many conditions. A publicly funded and independently run programme of “de-medicalisation,” based on respect for human dignity, rather than shareholder value or professional hubris, is overdue.

Recommendations for “de-medicalising” normal conditions:

Move away from using corporate funded information on medical conditions/ diseases

Generate independent accessible materials on conditions and diseases

Widen notions of informed consent to include information about controversy surrounding the definitions of conditions and diseases

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[Mark_ABH]

Thank you for sharing this. American Bone Health does receive some unrestricted grant funding from various corporate partners, which are listed here: americanbonehealth.org/corp... ... These companies have no input into the content of our materials or programming. Input on our content comes from a Medical & Scientific Advisory Board made up of leading academics from the scientific and medical communities. americanbonehealth.org/our-...

Here's an example of how we have covered an important development involving one of our corporate partners. Amgen recently won approval for an osteoporosis drug called Evenity. There were stories about Amgen all over the major media. Note that we prominently mention potentially serious/fatal side effects of Evenity and disclose that Amgen is a corporate partner. americanbonehealth.org/medi...

American Bone Health has been recognized with the Gold Star award for transparency by leading nonprofit clearinghouse GuideStar. americanbonehealth.org/news... ... We are working to reach Platinum status by sharing even more information about our workings and strategies.

American Bone Health volunteers provide hundreds of free educational programs all over the U.S. to teach consumers about exercise, proper nutrition, and how to maintain their own health and advocate for themselves to their physicians. We aren't here to push drugs, and we aren't some industry sock-puppet.

[MiaLee]

Thank you for revealing your corporate ties. Honest disclosure is always important information that people need to know. Have to say, wish there were more sources uncoupled with corporate ties though. It’s disheartening to find corporations in all aspects of health care and advocacy. Makes trust difficult you must admit.