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Disease Mongering: Inventing Illness To Sell A Cure
The Fat Doctor Podcast
Disease mongering has transformed human body diversity into a medical crisis requiring pharmaceutical intervention. When Ray Moynihan wrote that "there's a lot of money to be made from telling healthy people they're sick," he exposed a corporate strategy that reaches its most devastating form in the creation of "ob*sity" as a disease. This wasn't accidental harm caused while trying to help people - this was intentional pathologization of natural human variation, funded by pharmaceutical companies and legitimized through corrupt alliances between industry, doctors, and supposed patient advocacy groups.
In this episode, I expose how the disease creation itself causes harm separate from any treatment: social exclusion, healthcare denial, psychological trauma, economic exploitation, and the erosion of bodily autonomy. We created a disease whose only "treatment" doesn't work and causes the very harms we attribute to the disease. They didn't just gnaw away at our self-confidence—they gnawed away at our right to exist.
Moynihan, Ray, Iona Heath, and David Henry. ‘Selling Sickness: The Pharmaceutical Industry and Disease Mongering’. BMJ : British Medical Journal 324, no. 7342 (2002): 886–91. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.324.7342.886.
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