Drug firms accused of turning healthy people into patients

• Guardian, Tuesday April 11 2006
• Ian Sample, science correspondent

You are lying on the sofa after a hard day at work and should be relaxing. But you are overcome by an insatiable urge to kick your legs about. As you struggle to control yourself, your kids run riot in the room. And to cap it all, your sex life is rubbish. Just an everyday scene in many people's ordinary lives, or the combination of three newly identified medical conditions (...)

This is an article from the Guardian that talks about something I've been seeing and wondering about for awhile now. The huge rise in ADHD diagnosed children in modern times is what first started me wondering about this, and this article cites some other very good examples.

I don't have much to add over the article really, except that health issues ALWAYS require a model that go beyond simple profit/loss calculations, and the pharm industry as its structured today doesn't pursue those solutions. Its not that profit shouldn't be a part of drug development, its that the definition of profit needs to include human values like quality of life. When dealing with health matters, we ALWAYS ned to expand the definition of profit, and the monetary end of it rge least important on that. A cost effective solution that doesn't work is surely useless ... but so is an effective solution that no one can afford to use.