EACH SEPARATE 21-DAY BLISTER PACK OF THE CONTRACEPTIVE PILL MARVELON COMES IN AN INDIVIDUAL FOILED WRAPPER WITH THE WORDING'CHILD RESISTANT PACK'

摘要

Are drugs companies making us think diseases are more common and more serious than they really are? A senior executive quoted in the British Medical Journal believes so―and he says it's the marketing people who are responsible. Fred Nadjarian, managing director of Roche'Australia, says: "The marketing people always beat [hype] these things up." He gives the example of social phobia, a disorder Roche planned to treat with the antidepressant moclobemide in the 1990s. A media release sponsored by Roche at the time announced that more than a million Australians suffered from this "soul destroying" psychiatric disorder. But Nadjarian now says social phobia cannot be that common, because when Roche tried to recruit people for clinical trials "we just weren't able to".