Sure the ads now say "you" instead of "she" and let women tell their doctor what's wrong with them instead of the other way around.
Sure the doctor now wonders what the point of medical school was if patients now decide both diagnoses and treatments. (Thank you, pharma.)
But the message that age in a woman is a Disease To Be Treated still moves more script than perhaps in any other category.
Until hormone replacement therapy was found to cause not prevent heart disease, stroke and cancer in women in 2002--sorry about that, ladies--HRT made $2 billion a year for Prempro and Premarin manufacturer Wyeth. More recently it has been correlated with lung and ovarian cancer, urinary incontinence, asthma and Alzheimer's disease. See: fountain of youth; not.
Since 85 percent of women said you want us to take WHAT and dropped HRT, closing Wyeth plants and hopefully Premarin ranches, pharma has scrambled to replace the Wall Street bonanza.
Thanks to actress Sally Field, an aging bones campaign is underway pushing bisphosphonate drugs for "osteopenia" even though the term was said to be made up by pharma when it installed bone density machine in doctor offices.
And with Prempro and Premarin in the dog house, pharma is now pushing psychoactive drugs for the "pathophysiology of menopause and the consequences of long term estrogen deprivation" as the journal Menopause succinctly puts it.
They say the drugs are also good for eyebrow plucking.
1 | 2
