Meanwhile, herb sales are climbing, despite the interference. The message behind these impressive tallies is that Americans are becoming increasingly confident in self-prescribing with herbs. A vigorous trend such as this takes dollars out of the pockets of drug companies and empowers individuals to be more responsible and proactive about their health. Even the routine equation of symptoms with diseases is often a sleight of hand, Dr. Payer comments. The primacy of diagnosis in American health care inevitably leads to doctors ordering more tests to see if patients have these newly described diseases.
More tests mean more equipment, and higher bills.
For example, consider the way high cholesterol and high blood pressure were upgraded from risk factors to diseases in their own right, capable of being modified by drug therapy, says Dr. Payer. Formerly a natural process in life, menopause is now treated as a hormone deficiency disease on a par with diabetes or hypothyroidism, Dr. Payer says. While advertising leads women to believe that a mammogram is the only way to reliably prevent breast cancer, the scientific data supporting the effectiveness of mammogram screening in women under 50 is scant and inconclusive, says Dr. Payer. Crudely but truthfully put, the more breasts that doctors can bring to mammography, the sooner they pay off their equipment and the better the profits. What fuels the disease-mongering machinery is as broad a target population as possible, Dr. Payer says.