Shire, Maker of Binge-Eating Drug Vyvanse, First Marketed the Disease:
The retired tennis player Monica Seles spent this month making the rounds of television talk shows… to share her personal struggle with binge eating…
binge eating is a real medical condition…
Ms. Seles is a paid spokeswoman for Shire, which late last month won approval to market its top-selling drug, Vyvanse, to treat binge-eating disorder, a condition that once existed in the shadow of better-known disorders like anorexia and bulimia but was officially recognized as its own disorder in 2013 by the American Psychiatric Association.
As Shire introduces an ambitious campaign to promote Vyvanse but also to raise awareness about the disorder, some are saying the company is going too far to market a drug, a type of amphetamine, that is classified by the federal government as having a high potential for abuse…
The company helped put another once-stigmatized condition — attention deficit hyperactivity disorder — on the medical map and made billions of dollars from the sale of drugs, like Vyvanse and Adderall, to treat it…
Suppose you are a pharmaceutical company. You invest millions, billions, of dollars in laboratories and chemists, and at the end of a very long process, the outcome is a new drug. Let’s call it, for fun, Mezuyafir. You then have to figure out what conditions that drug can treat.
If it cures a diagnosable disease, that’s good! But if it just changes the chemical composition of people’s brains to make them more happy, more docile, more virile or more focused, that’s even better.
What you now need to do is come up with a medical condition that matches with your new drug. In some cases, the condition may be real and serious; in other cases the condition might be real but not very serious; in other cases the condition will inevitably be frivolous. Let’s call it Magafitis.
Then, though it is legal under many circumstances in the United States to market your new drug directly to consumers, you actually market the hell out of the condition with lots of crass commercial advertisements that advise people to “Talk to your doctor about” whatever problem that they never realized was a problem.
Hey, Magafitis can be serious! It’s a serious issue! Someone knows someone who knows someone who spent a year in bed recovering from Magafitis! And there is a whole forum on the internet for people to share stories and tips about how to find a doctor who takes Magafitis seriously.
Advertising works, so lots and lots and lots and lots of people are going to start asking their doctors about that issue. And the doctors out there – bless them all – are very good at prescribing drugs.
Suppose two thirds of the people who talk to their doctors about Magafitis get prescriptions to treat it. If your new drug Mezuyafir is the only one available that treats Magafitis, the condition that you just made up, then millions of people are going to start taking it, and you’re going to become very rich.
Welcome to pharma marketing.