PLoS Medicine challenges "disease mongering"

Good news today for the open access journal PLoS Medicine from the US non-profit Public Library of Science, an organisation committed to making scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource.

It's latest issue has given prominence to a collection of articles on Disease Mongering, including some seriously challenging articles like "Bigger and Better: How Pfizer Redefined Erectile Dysfunction", "The Latest Mania: Selling Bipolar Disorder", "Cholinesterase Inhibitors: Drugs Looking for a Disease?", and "Pharmaceutical Marketing and the Invention of the Medical Consumer".

PLoS Medicine published the articles to coincide with an inaugural conference on the issue in Australia earlier this month. Disease Mongering – quite an evocative term isn't it - is of increasing concern to medical professionals, as market forces start to distort the activities of the giant pharmaceutical companies. Their vast marketing and PR machines have, however, already begun the fightback.

The UK liberal broadsheet The Guardian has today, for instance, published a large report in its financial news section allowing the likes of GlaxoSmithKline to respond to the allegations. GSK has been accused of creating the "restless legs" syndrome as part of its marketing activities around the launch of its Ropinirole drug. But lots of other drugs – from Viagra to Zyprexa – are also being targeted as examples of corporate-created solutions that went in search of a "disease".

PLoS has done a great job in bringing this subject to a wider audience. I'd sincerely hope that similar issues would be aired in those STM journals and magazines that take advertising revenues from the drugs companies. But in an age where pharmaceutical firms are directly sponsoring online journals and magazines (take Breast Cancer Resource, sponsored by AstraZeneca), I'd wonder how much the journalistic ethics of independence and investigation could be compromised in such environments. No pharma company would ever allow its money to be used to support such challenging editorial content as that currently available through PLoS Medicine.