Disease trafficking involves creating and promoting a disease and its treatment for profit, often targeting non-life-threatening conditions. It involves medicalizing symptoms, creating treatments, and advertising the disease to the public. The term is often applied to psychiatric disorders and can be controversial. It is important to consider both sides and make informed decisions.
Disease trafficking is a type of aggressive advertising that works to convince people without medical experience that certain diseases exist. Typically, this type of behavior is applied to conditions that are not life-threatening and only problematic from a certain perspective. Advertisements for baldness treatments, for example, could be seen as an example of disease selling. Usually, this term is reserved for more serious attempts to profit from pharmaceuticals and medical treatments and could be applied to unnecessary diagnoses of mental health problems.
The strategies used in disease trafficking to make money involve first establishing that a disease exists by medicalizing a certain set of behaviors or symptoms. A group of behavior problems in children, for example, could become a newly discovered disorder. Disease trading can also group physical symptoms together to create an ailment, but this is often more difficult to accomplish. Usually, intangible symptoms are easier to treat because they are highly subjective.
Usually, the next step is to figure out a way to treat that ailment. Often, treatment for a problem will involve large medical bills and medications. Sometimes, particularly in the case of psychiatric disorders, these drugs can be dangerous or ineffective. Often they simply work by making the user happier, calmer, or otherwise different from their previous state.
Once both a disease and its treatment exist, it is important to disclose the ailment. A disease can become popular either because it has prestige or because people are afraid. As soon as the disease is recognized as legitimate in the news and among people without medical degrees, it is effectively advertised. Using this model, a pharmaceutical company that produces a cure for a harmless disease can make a very large profit.
People often accuse professionals involved in psychiatry of selling disease because mental disorders are defined in relation to a non-existent normal human mind. Often, people who oppose medical practices on religious or philosophical grounds make disease-selling allegations aimed at most medical professionals. In some respects, drugs for postpartum depression are considered products of the disease trade.
Whether a practice should be defined by this pejorative term is largely a matter of perspective. From the perspective of the pharmaceutical company or other organization, the company provides information directly to the public, allowing for greater control over individual health. On the other hand, from the perspective of those who accuse the organization of disease trafficking, the drug companies are effectively dispersing disinformation that could potentially harm the public. In general, a good way to avoid being hurt by this practice is to consider the claims made by both sides and then make a decision informed by facts rather than rhetoric.
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