The series was about the process known as medicalization, or how conditions of everyday life are turned into formal medical or psychiatric disorders that can be treated with dangerous and often expensive drugs. The series focused on eight such conditions: adult ADHD, pre-diabetes, binge-eating disorder, intermittent explosive disorder, low testosterone, female sexual interest/arousal disorder, overactive bladder and pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder.
Key findings include:
-
Drug company money was found at nearly every step in the process, usually in the form of major funding for medical organizations that define the disorders or to pay influential doctors who work as speakers or consultants and who then author favorable research or national treatment guidelines.
-
More than 180 million Americans are purported to be afflicted by the eight disorders — the equivalent of 77% of the adult population — but those estimates often were inflated and came from drug company funded surveys.
-
While none of the conditions are life-threatening, many of the drugs themselves have been linked to deaths. Since 2013 alone, nearly 65,000 serious complications, including more than 1,600 deaths, were attributed to drugs used to treat five of the conditions, according to a Journal Sentinel/MedPage Today analysis of the FDA’s adverse events reporting system database.
-
Most of the drugs have marginal effectiveness. Doctors may have to write, three, four, five or even a dozen prescriptions before one person gets a benefit, according to a biostatistical analysis of drug company data done for the series by a researcher at Yale University School of Medicine.