Restless leg syndrome is one of the most common but
unrecognized disease out there, so of course with people not fully aware of
what the disease entails it is easy for someone to just WebMD their symptoms
and easily decide themselves that they have the disease.
The result of such self-diagnosis plus a number of other
factors leads to the pushing of pharmaceutical drugs and the big problem of over
diagnosing by doctors. The way they do this is by making people think they have
a couple of the 4 main symptoms that RLS requires and then tell them that your
doctor probably missed it so you should basically make him give you the
diagnosis in order for them to prescribe them the drug and overall make the pharmaceutical
company that much richer.
The worst part is that most pharmaceutical related media outlets
don’t even mention the drug as a way to distance themselves from the disease.
It is really just a way to cover up the over diagnosing. I mean can’t they see
that this isn’t helping anyone, it makes the people who are actually healthy
think there is something wrong with them and possibly cause them to have
adverse side effects from the drug itself.
In order to do better we must make sure we understand clearly
what the drug really is and research thoroughly the symptoms to make sure we
are really at risk as well as quantify the side effects and be able to weigh
the benefits of said drug on those who actually need it. Pushing drugs on to
people for no other reason than to make money off of them is one of the worst
things that drug companies could do, how are we supposed to trust them as well
as discern if the drug is even helpful, like if a person who claims to have RLS
but in actuality does not then says they are having whatever side effect from
the drug how is a physician truly going to determine whether it’s from the
disease or the drug?
I commented on Brett’s Blog
I like how you mentioned how we have to do our research. True, we may only find information that makes one believe something is wrong with them. But it is also true that once we decide to take a medication, it is our responsibility for our own health, to research the drug ourselves so that we know exactly what we are in for.
ReplyDeleteThe media's role in perpetuating the corruption enacted by drug companies is something that I think a lot of the general public never catches onto. We often trust these news entities to be moral and truthful in their coverage so we often raise no concern or question. With that said, I would like to see more of the resources these media companies have put into departments that hire individuals with knowledge and experience on drugs and diseases to help with validity and fact checking.
ReplyDeleteBeware of Ads!!! No, but really the way the media targets certain populations with these ads is scary. They can convince uniformed individuals that normal behaviors are pathological only to feed into their billon dollar industry.
ReplyDelete