DRUG companies are pushing the NHS into possible “financial collapse” by hyping new diseases and encouraging patients to demand medicines, the Royal College of General Practitioners has said.
Pulse (Aug 23) reports how the college has told a Commons Health Select Committee inquiry that drug companies are “disease mongering”. It adds that overuse of prescription drugs is a “serious and growing problem”.
The college claims that normal variations in people’s health are now arbitrarily being classified as diseases and that companies are more interested in selling preventative drugs to the healthy than in healing the sick. The Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry says the claims are rubbish.