Big Pharma Pushes Drugs That Cause Conditions They Are Supposed to Prevent

Like gastroesophageal reflux and bipolar disease, osteopenia began to inflict millions when a drug to treat it was patented.

"Osteopenia, or the risk of developing osteoporosis, was concocted as a disease at a World Health Organization osteoporosis conference in Rome in 1992 that was sponsored by two drug companies and a drug company foundation," writes Susan Kelleher in the Seattle Times.

Using the bone density measurements or "T scores" of a 30-year-old woman as a standard, the new condition, osteopenia, had "boundaries so broad they include more than half of all women over 50," writes Kelleher. And it didn't hurt that 10,000 bone density measuring machines appeared in doctors' offices to detect the new disease -- only 750 existed in 1995 -- many owned and financed by Merck, whose anti-bone-thinning drug Fosamax came online in 1995.

No wonder doctor visits for thinning bones increased by 5 million from 1994 to 2003, according to the Associated Press.

Of course, selling "prevention" to at-risk patients is a pharma gold mine.

It keeps patients on meds for decades through fear, alarmist marketing and after-this-because-of-this reasoning -- since a patient doesn't know if she would have gotten the disease anyway.

So even when reports of Fosamax-related jaw problems called osteonecrosis surfaced -- 1,000 cases have been documented -- and even when a study in the Archives of Internal Medicine this year found that Fosamax doubled women's risk of irregular heartbeat, which can cause clots and strokes, few doubted its primary action of protecting women's bones.

But now, like hormone replacement therapy, which also exploited women's fear of aging and social marginalization, Fosamax appears to cause the conditions it's supposed to prevent.

Since 2006, articles in the New England Journal of Medicine, Journal of Orthopedic Trauma, Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery, Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism and Aging Clinical and Experimental Research have suggested the anti-bone turnover action of bisphosphonate drugs like Fosamax can in some cases cause fractures.

Oops.