Is it a disease or a profit center?
Feeling bad is just part of the human condition sometimes. Physically, we’ve all toughed out the flu or an unexplained muscle pain that went away with a little rest. Women overcome the discomfort of menstruation and adolescents live through the embarrassment of acne. All of these can go beyond “acceptable” levels of pain to require medical intervention, but as humans we soldier through them most of the time. 
Psychologically, we accept a certain amount of pain too. The pain of a broken heart, the death of a loved one, the stress of work, the anxiety of social situations are all things we are usually prepared to live with, but any one of them could easily tip over into the realm of “disease”.
Where does one draw the line? Low T, Simple Chronic Halitosis, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Oppositional-Defiant Disorders, and a slough of other physical and psychological ailments have their roots in real conditions that can cripple people’s lives, but most of us at least occasionally deal with mild versions of these problems throughout our lives. When do they become diseases? One answer is, when there’s money to be made.
Here are several stories that examine the link between diseases, “diseases”, and the marketing departments of pharmaceutical companies around the world. And just for fun, we have one article that tells you how to get healthier without going to the pill poppers…
Hey Doc, I Have Poop Disorder’: 6 ‘Diseases’ Big Pharma Is Trying to Make You Believe You Suffer From, Martha Rosenberg on AlterNet, Dec 2014
Peddling Paranoia, Alan Cassels in New Internationalist Magazine, Nov 2003
Disorders Made to Order, Brendan Koerner in Mother Jones, Jul/Aug 2002
Selling Sickness: How Drug Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients, Michael Fitzpatrick in the British Medical Journal, Sep 2005
Psychiatry’s sick compulsion: turning weaknesses into diseases, Irwin Savodnik in Los Angeles Times, Jan 2006
Calling an Ordinary Health Problem a Disease Leads to Bigger Problems, Aaron Carroll in the New York Times, Jun, 2014
Disease mongering and drug marketing, Howard Wolinsky in EMBO Reports, Jul 2005
Feeling Intense Emotions Doesn’t Make You Crazy—But That’s Not What Big Pharma Wants You to Think, Allegra Kirkland on AlterNet, Mar 2015
And here’s the “Good News” article… The Science of Stress and How Our Emotions Affect Our Susceptibility to Burnout and Disease, Maria Popova, Brain Pickings
