Reflecting on Health Care Marketing

The current health care marketing scene is characterized by commercial television and print advertising that markets health care products and services to consumers by trying to create a market for them. In many cases, the way health care providers and pharmaceutical houses create their market is by attempting to label normal physical conditions as diseases. An example is menopause, which every woman goes through as a natural part of aging. The medical community has depicted menopause as a disease requiring medication and assays to convince women in its advertising that "correcting" menopause with prescription drugs is essential for their health and well-being. I deplore this tactic, particularly since hormone replacement therapy has been widely documented as contributing to female cancers such as breast cancer and because virtually all of these trumped-up conditions are really just a smokescreen for pharmaceutical companies to generate greater sales of their drugs. This is a pharmaceutical approach to medicine rather than a health-oriented approach in which people are taught what foods and lifestyle choices can offer them relief of their symptoms. Moreover, menopause does not require medication, and prior to the development of hormone replacement drugs such as synthetic estrogen, women weathered menopause drug-free with few problems other than hot flashes. Some "diseases" such as diabetes are not even diseases at all; diabetes is merely a metabolic condition tha

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