Disease mongering
If big pharmaceutical companies are losing their patents on some of there best-selling medicines for common diseases and conditions, they need never fret. All they have to do is follow the example of #2 drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and come up with a new ailment, or at least one that almost no-one thought needed its own drug, and get consumers to demand it.
That's a story told in a recent Wall Street Journal article ("Promotional Muscle", 10/25/06). As the article puts it: "When drug giant GlaxoSmithKline PLC launched a new medicine for restless-legs syndrome last year, few people had heard of the affliction, and some physicians were skeptical that it even existed."
Now it looks like Requip, the drug in question, will gross a significant $500-$600 million in sales this year. A major marketing blitz with TV advertisement and reach-out to physicians is convincing "many consumers and physicians to accept RLS as a real condition warranting treatment."
Requip, a dopamine suppressor, was invented as a treatment for an undoubtedly grave illness, Parkinson's disease. It is a useful drug giving some Parkinson's patent alleviation from muscle spasm. But when a few doctors started trying the drug for the milder restless-leg disorder, the drug company took notice.
Many doctors dismissed the syndromes as mere "fidgeting" in the past. But once the FDA approved the drug as a RLS treatment, Glaxo "hired an army of sleep-disorder specialists and invited general practitioners to dinner at fancy restaurants across the U.S.," in order to push the drug. Now Glaxo is claiming, based on a single study, that one in ten people suffer from RLS, a syndrome only a few specialists had ever heard of before last year. Needless to say, that claim has been greeted with skepticism.
And now other developers of Parkinson's treatments are looking at the new RLS market, other rivals are following suit. These include Germany firm Boehringer-Ingelheim and Belgium's UCB SA.
So what if people are treating their cholesterol, high-blood pressure, and arthritis with generic medicines. The big drugmakers will press on, not finding cures for known diseases, but rather finding diseases for known cures.
9:58:36 PM 
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