The same attenuation of derisive terms is seen elsewhere in society: people are not homeless they are unhoused. Children are not slow learners, they are exceptional and have special needs. Criminals are lawbreakers, the unemployed are jobless, prostitutes are sex workers, garbage collectors are sanitation engineers and so on. What's in a name? The changes are good and a long time coming.
But not when they are used by Pharma to sell drugs.
Anyone who watches TV in the US knows that, to sell drugs, Pharma sells diseases. Do you "suffer" from seasonal allergies, depression, dry eye and adult ADHD? Do you "struggle" with bipolar disorder, osteopenia, perimenopause, excessive daytime sleepiness and irritable bowel syndrome?
By selling diseases, Pharma has made the US the most hypochondriac country in the world. Drugmakers are laughing all the way to the bank as people buy extortion-priced drugs for decades.
Don't suffer or struggle from the symptoms you hear about on TV? That's only because you have a "silent" disease: go get screened. (We need to pay for the machine.)
Or maybe you are "at risk" for diseases you've never heard of. Also get screened. "Be afraid. Be very afraid."
Most Pharma-sold diseases do exist but they are churned and fanned to create patients. Hypochondria makes Pharma and health insurers money; healthy people don't.
Dangers of National Hypochondria
Ad-produced hypochondria exposes people to dangerous drugs they often don't need, raises health care costs and taxes and worse: they confer victim "identities" on the gullible and the attention and melodrama that go with them. They create medical monsters.
How often have you met someone "suffering" from an obscure disease you have never heard of that requires special treatment, accommodations, expensive preps and exquisite self-pity? Even doctors are sick of these "peculiar" patients that Pharma has created say my colleagues.
Probably the worst aspect of Pharma disease mongering is the melodramatic terms it stole from the Woke movement where their use was valid. Do people "live" with poverty, unemployment, racism and homelessness? Absolutely. Do they "live with" obesity, GERD, sensory-based motor disorder, Sjogren's exocrine pancreatic insufficiency, PTSD and "depression"? Only when Pharma needs new, life-long patients and they have the time and money to spend being "sick." Only when they watch too much TV.
In the richest country in the world, the second worst aspect of Pharma disease mongering is it creates victim wannabes; it derails would-be activists from working for social change because they are licking their ad-created disease wounds--"living with, suffering and struggling with" conditions barely acknowledged a few years ago.
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