Inventing a Disease to Sell Drugs Edit

The Thin Pill
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Obsessed with thin?  Wired had a great article about how pharmaceutical companies more or less created a disease (called fat) and then invented drugs to cure it.  Interesting.

From Wired:
75 million Americans may have something called metabolic syndrome. How Big Pharma turned obesity into a disease – then invented the drugs to cure it.

The breakthrough came last December when her new endocrinologist diagnosed her with something called metabolic syndrome. She’d never heard of it. As she Googled to learn more, her chronic ailments – the weight, the high blood pressure, the lack of energy – started to make sense. They even seemed treatable. She’s now on Glucophage and Avandia (which both regulate blood sugar) and has lost 20 pounds by cutting out carbohydrates. “Getting a diagnosis was a relief,” Cunningham says. “I have hope now, whereas I didn’t have any before.”