Mainstream media avoiding any mention of link between psychiatric drugs and violent shootings

by: J. D. Heyes 
NaturalNews.com
Dec.24, 2012

Whether it's because most members of the mainstream media are simply oblivious to the effects of psychotropic drugs, whether it's a biased political agenda, laziness or a combination of all of those elements, you will be hard-pressed to find many journalists who dare to link the dangers of these medications to the growing number of horrific mass murders that have occurred with alarming frequency in recent years.

The most recent of these involved 20-year-old Adam Lanza, who killed his mother before traveling to the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., earlier this month to murder 20 Kindergarten children and six adults.

In the days following the shooting, initial exclusive reports from the New York Daily News said that Lanza went on his rampage when he learned he was about to be committed to a psychiatric institution by his mother. According to the report, a "bar pal" who did not want to be named told the paper Nancy Lanza told him her son was "burning himself" and that she feared she was "losing him."

The disappearing details

What that initial report also said, according to InfoWars.com, was that Adam Lanza was on a psychotropic drug.

"Adam's uncle....said he was taking an anti-psychotic drug called Fanapt," New York Magazine said in a follow-up report, quoting the initial New York Daily News story.

But then, InfoWars.com noted, that little factoid disappeared from the online versions of those initial reports.

"It's almost certain that the original version of the article did mention this before being amended, and that the NY Mag piece was based on the original NY Daily News piece," InfoWars.com reported.

Why would mainstream newspapers and magazines want to hide the fact that Lanza - and a host of previous mass murderers - were taking psychotropic drugs that almost certainly contributed to their deadly behavior?

The obvious answer is that blaming the drug takes away from their anti-gun agenda.

But the fact that these tragedies are being committed by psychiatric basket cases on drugs has not escaped the attention of everyone.

Big Pharma dollars doing the talking?

Continue Reading at: http://www.naturalnews.com/038456_mainstream_media_psychiatric_drugs_school_shootings.html#ixzz2G2PPbMKt

22 Stats That Prove That There Is Something Seriously Wrong With Young Men In America

Michael Snyder
Economic Collapse
December 18, 2012

When are we finally going to admit that we have a very serious problem with this generation of young men in America?  We have failed them so dramatically that it is hard to put it into words.  We have raised an entire generation of young males that don’t know how to be men, and many of them feel completely lost.  Sometimes they feel so lost that they “snap” in very destructive ways.  Adam Lanza and James Holmes are two names that come to mind.  Why is it that mass murderers are almost always young men?  Why don’t young women behave the same way?  Sadly, Adam Lanza and James Holmes are just the tip of the iceberg of a much larger problem in our society.  Our young women vastly outperform our young men in almost every important statistical category.  Young men are much more likely to perform poorly in school, they are much more likely to have disciplinary problems and they are much more likely to commit suicide.  In the old days, our young men would gather in the streets or in the parks to play with one another after school, but today most of them are content to spend countless hours feeding their addictions to video games, movies and other forms of entertainment.  When our young men grow up, many of them are extremely averse to taking on responsibility.  They want to have lots of sex, but they aren’t interested in marriage.  They enjoy the comforts of living at home, but they don’t want to go out and pursue career goals so that they can provide those things for themselves.  Our young men are supposed to be “the leaders of tomorrow”, but instead many of them are a major burden on society.  When are we finally going to admit that something has gone horribly wrong?

There is even a name for this generation of young men that does not want to grow up.  It is called the “Peter Pan generation”.  They want to enjoy the benefits of being grown up without ever taking on the responsibilities.  A member of this “Peter Pan generation” recent wrote an article for the Daily Mail in which he discussed what he and his friends are going through…

I haven’t yet had to grow up so, well, I haven’t.
Reckless, irresponsible and immature? Yes. But at least I can take comfort in the fact I am not alone.
Last week, I read that there is even a name for people such as me. We are the ‘Peter Pan generation’; a sizeable group of 25 to 40-year-olds who exist in a state of extended adolescence, avoiding the trappings of responsibility — marriage, mortgage, children — for as long as possible.
‘Our society is full of lost boys and girls hanging out at the edge of adulthood,’ says Professor Frank Furedi, a sociologist who has been studying this phenomenon, at the University of Kent.
‘Another word sometimes used to describe these people is “adultescent” — generally defined as someone who refuses to settle down and make commitments, and who would rather go on partying into middle age.’

Young men in America didn’t always behave this way.  Several decades ago, men in America moved away from home, got married and had children much earlier than they do now.  But the young men of today seem to want to put off the “markers of adulthood” for as long as possible.  The following is from an outstanding article by Sandy Hingston…

Sociologists cite five “markers” or “milestones” that have traditionally defined our notion of adulthood: finishing school, moving away from the parental home, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child. In 1960, 65 percent of men had ticked off all five by age 30; by 2000, only a third had. The experts have plenty of explanations for what’s come to be called “extended adolescence” or “emerging adulthood”—or what New York Times columnist David Brooks calls the “Odyssey Years.” They blame helicopter parents, the burden of student loan debt, much higher poverty rates among young people (nearly half of all Americans ages 25 to 34 live below the national level), and a dearth of vo-tech training and manufacturing jobs. Almost 60 percent of parents are now giving money to their grown kids—an average of $38,340 per child in the years between ages 18 and 34. Whatever happened to the son looking after his mom?

So why is all of this happening?
Well, there are a whole host of reasons.  But certainly parents and our education system have to bear much of the blame.  In the old days, young men were taught what it means to “be a man”, and morality was taught to young men both by their parents and in the schools.  But today, most young men have very little understanding of what “manhood” is, and our society has taught them that morality doesn’t really matter.  Instead, television and movies constantly portray young men as sex-obsessed slackers that just want to party all the time, so that is what many of our young men have become.

How much better off would our society be if we had trained this generation of young men to love, honor, protect and take care of others?
How much better off would our society be if we had nurtured the manhood of our young men instead of teaching them to be ashamed of it?
How much better off would our society be if we had disciplined our young men and taught them morality when they were getting off track instead of just letting them do whatever they wanted?
The following are 22 stats that prove that there is something seriously wrong with young men in America today… (CONTINUE READING)

Big Pharma shifting from deadly chemical drugs to bioelectric implants

(NaturalNews)
Wednesday, August 08, 2012
by: Ethan A. Huff

Not content simply drugging its millions of victims with mind-altering chemical and biological inputs, the pharmaceutical industry is now developing ways to literally transform the human brain into a drug industry-controlled, biometric computer that will basically turn human beings into nothing more than mind-controlled robots.

The Financial Times reports that GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), the drug behemoth recently forced to fork over the largest ever amount in fines for its massive criminal conduct (http://www.naturalnews.com), is leading the way in unveiling what the industry is now calling "bioelectronics." The premise holds that certain diseases can be treated by injecting electronic devices within the body for the purpose of artificially controlling neuronal synapses and other activity.

"Moving beyond conventional drugs that interact biochemically with the body, [Big Pharma] will have built a big 'bioelectronics' business that treats disease through electrical signaling in the brain and elsewhere," writes Clive Cookson for FT.com about the concept, which is expected to eventually replace many common drugs. (CONTINUE READING)

Shock vaccine study reveals influenza vaccines only prevent the flu in 1.5 out of 100 adults

Not 60% as you’ve been told

Mike Adams
Natural News
Thursday, October 27, 2011

A new scientific study published in The Lancet reveals that influenza vaccines only prevent influenza in 1.5 out of every 100 adults who are injected with the flu vaccine. Yet, predictably, this report is being touted by the quack science community, the vaccine-pushing CDC and the scientifically-inept mainstream media as proof that “flu vaccines are 60% effective!”

This absurd claim was repeated across the mainstream media over the past few days, with all sorts of sloppy reporting that didn’t even bother to read the study itself (as usual).
NaturalNews continues to earn a reputation for actually READING these “scientific” studies and then reporting what they really reveal, not what some vaccine-pushing CDC bureaucrat wants them to say. So we purchased the PDF file from The Lancet and read this study to get the real story.
The “60% effectiveness” claim is a total lie – here’s why
What we found is that the “60% effectiveness” claim is utterly absurd and highly misleading. For starters, most people think that “60% effectiveness” means that for every 100 people injected with the flu shot, 60 of them won’t get the flu!
Thus, the “60% effectiveness” claim implies that getting a flu shot has about a 6 in 10 chance of preventing you from getting the flu.

This is utterly false.
In reality — and this is spelled out right in Figure 2 of the study itself, which is entitled, “Efficacy and effectiveness of influenza vaccines: a systematic review and meta-analysis” — only about 2.7 in 100 adults get the flu in the first place!
See the abstract at:
http://www.thelancet.com/journals/l…
Flu vaccine stops influenza in only 1.5 out of 100 adults who get the shots
Let’s start with the actual numbers from the study.
The “control group” of adults consisted of 13,095 non-vaccinated adults who were monitored to see if they caught influenza. Over 97% of them did not. Only 357 of them caught influenza, which means only 2.7% of these adults caught the flu in the first place. (CONTINUE READING)

Why Ron Paul (In 60 Seconds)

Why Ron Paul (In 60 Seconds): From David Kretzmann This is our entry to a Ron Paul video contest on YouTube. Please "like" the video on YouTube, share with your friends, and spread the word! Feel free to subscribe to the DavidKretzmann YouTube channel:http://youtube.com/DavidK.... Thank You!

USDA trying to run organic leafy green growers out of business

Sunday, July 17, 2011 by: Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Results of the passage of S. 510, the FDA Food Safety Modernization Act, are beginning to come into play -- and in this case the US Department of Agriculture (USDA), rather than the FDA, has decided to take the helm.

A recent Action Alert posted by the Cornucopia Institute (CI) warns that current efforts by handlers and marketers of green leafy vegetables are attempting to formulate one-size-fits-all "food safety" standards for the entire industry that threaten to put small, organic growers at a competitive and economic disadvantage. They may even put small, family-scale growers out of business.

NaturalNews and many other news sources put out repeated warnings last year about the ill intentions of S. 510, including that the small growers would be uprooted by its provisions if it passed (http://www.naturalnews.com/S_510.html).

Now that it has, we are beginning to see the consequences of this bill come into play. Difficult guidelines for all growers, are being proposed.

According to the alert, corporate agribusiness is attempting to form a "National Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement" with the USDA that will allegedly set standards to help prevent contamination and disease outbreaks. But as many NaturalNews readers already know, leafy greens are not dangerous. It is large-scale factory animal farms that pollute air and water that are mostly to blame. (CONTINUE READING)

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/033021_leafy_greens_food_safety.html#ixzz1SNufc0N4

The worlds largest human experiment: GMOs, Roundup and the Monsanto monstrosity – part one

Madison Ruppert, Contributing Writer
Activist Post

Informed consent is one of the most basic aspects of patient-physician relations, as well as subject-researcher relations in the case of research studies. This involves making the patient aware of and verifying that they understand the risks, benefits, facts, and the future implications of the procedure or test they are going to be subjected to.

In the case of genetically modified organisms we have not been made aware of the risks. In fact, the GMO industry has deliberately hidden the real dangers behind the seeds and herbicides they peddle.  The Food and Drug Administration of the United States of America has defined informed consent in the following bureaucratic jargon:  (CONTINUE READING)

Vaccines activate moron genes that cause further belief in vaccines (Satire)

Mike Adams
Natural News
February 27, 2011
Weekend satire special: New research accidentally conducted by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation has discovered that vaccines activate the “moron” genes that normally lie dormant in human beings. Once activated, these “moron genes” cause individuals to lose higher brain function and the ability to question false information fed to them by doctors, drug companies and the media. This, in turn, results in even more people pursuing repeated vaccines, further causing expression of the moron genes, over and over again, until their brain function collapses to the level of a raw vegetable… otherwise known as a “voter.”
Because of their disastrous effects on higher brain function, these vaccines are now being called “Moron Vaccines.”
Moron Vaccines contain all the usual ingredients of flu vaccines and MMR vaccines, including methyl mercury, aluminum, formaldehyde and DNA fragments from diseased monkey organs. (This is truly what’s found in other vaccines…)
But Moron Vaccines have one ingredient that’s slightly different. As Dr. All Proffit, a leading vaccine patent holder, explained, “Moron Vaccines are much like regular vaccines, except instead of taking diseased material from infected cows and monkeys, we take brain cell samples from existing morons which are easy to find among our colleagues. We then weaken those brain cells to make them even more moronic, and then we inject them into infants and children, mixed with a bit of mercury to make sure it targets the neurological system for maximum effectiveness.”
The result? As Bill Gates explains, “Billions of children each year are being saved from IBFD.” IBFD is short for “Intelligent Brain Function Disorder. It is an affliction affecting hundreds of millions of people each year, causing them to achieve dangerously high levels of cognitive function that causes them to ask inappropriate questions about vaccines such as, “Why have vaccines never been tested against non-vaccinated children?” Or, “Why do vaccines cause some children and teens to collapse into autism, comas or death?” Or, “Why don’t flu vaccines actually prevent flu symptoms in 99 out of 100 people who receive them?”
Those questions have no place in today’s medical system, where the correct answer to every disease is — as doctors are routinely taught — “More vaccines!”
“The population is too intelligent for its own good,” Dr. Proffit added. “The only way to keep people in line with the expectations of Big Government, Big Pharma and America’s top employers such as McDonald’s and Wal-Mart is to increase the moron density in America through a determined, long-term vaccination program carried out with the help of doctors and government medical authorities.”
To financially support that program, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (BMGF) is investing over fifty billion dollars to roll out Moron Vaccines on a global scale. “This will help ensure that more people buy Microsoft products,” explained Gates. “Because if they regain higher brain function, they might be tempted to run Linux instead.”
The FDA granted approval to the Moron Vaccines based on the scientific clinical trial data provided by the maker of the vaccines, most of which was, believe it or not, fabricated by morons. “This is why the data are so consistently reliable,” explained the company CEO. “When you’re studying Moron Vaccines, who better to offer an experienced perspective than an actual moron posing as a research scientist?”
The FDA was influenced in its decision to approve the vaccines by the CDC, which recently warned that America was “suffering from an epidemic of critical thinking” that threatened the future of the U.S. government, the Federal Reserve, and the vaccine industry in particular. The source of this epidemic has been traced to Rep. Ron Paul, of course.
“People who think for themselves are a threat to the U.S. government, and they are causing problems at airports, too,” said DHS secretary Janet Napolitano. “That’s why we’ve partnered with the FDA to make sure that those suffering from Intelligent Brain Function Disorder are offered ‘treatment’ at every opportunity.”(CONTINUE READING)

Industrial Farming: Immorality, Subsidized

By David Kretzmann  Feb 7th, 2011

As a lifelong vegetarian, no style of meat production is particularly appealing or justifiable to me. However, despite my herbivore bias, I still see an ethical dilemma present in current industrial meat facilities. Little respect is given to the conditions and treatment of the animals in industrial facilities. Animals rarely see the light of day for any substantial amount of time and they are raised on concrete floors; they are treated as mere products without regard for their status as living, breathing beings. The greatest crime, however, is that industrial facilities survive purely out of price floors, legal code, and other direct government subsidies that hinder competition from natural, local food systems.
A superior product in the marketplace should not require extra help from a government agency, whether it be in the form of a price guarantee for corn (the main substance fed to livestock in industrial facilities), legal code that mandates industrial farming (or heavily restricts other methods of non-industrial farming), or other government subsidies. The fact that industrial livestock facilities rely on government assistance for survival is a testament to their flawed, unnecessary, and undesirable business practices. (If they don’t require government assistance for survival, why continue providing subsidies and other competitive advantages to these corporate industrial livestock giants?) If people prefer to purchase industrial livestock meat over locally grown free range meat, there is no need for subsidies or other governmental involvement. Clearly, subsidies are needed only when a corporation or industry (such as industrial livestock producers) offers a lousy product that people won’t normally desire.
Government subsidies merely provide the illusion of cheap prices, which goes a long way in distorting the prices and actions of people in the marketplace. The fact that industrial meat is the cheapest does not mean it’s a better product or business model, particularly when you account for the government assistance needed to lower the price in the first place. Of course, it is us, the taxpayers, who are providing the subsidies, so the cost we pay for “cheap” food at the grocery store isn’t actually very cheap. We pay taxes to provide farm and grain subsidies, fund the bureaucracies who regulate and administer fines to farmers who don’t cooperate with the industrial system, among other taxpayer-funded programs.

Society is not bearing the cost of water pollution, of antibiotic resistance, of food-borne illnesses, of crop subsidies, of subsidized oil and water- of all the hidden costs to the environment and the taxpayer that make cheap food seem cheap. No thinking person will tell you they don’t care about all that. I tell them the choice is simple: You can buy honestly priced food or you can buy irresponsibly priced food. – Joel Salatin [i]

Clearly the industrial food system has government tilted in its favor; its products are cheap not because of their superior taste or flavor, but because they have managed to successfully crawl into bed with government to dismantle other legitimately competitive businesses. The philosophy of the industrial food system can be summed up in this statement: if people won’t buy your lousy, nauseating product, lobby government for subsidies and other protectionist interventions to dismantle competitors who actually offer a product desirable to the public. (CONTINUE READING ARTICLE)

Industry bought Congressional votes to pass S. 510 food safety bill

Wednesday, December 01, 2010 by: Jonathan Benson, staff writer

(NaturalNews) Despite an incredible outpouring of public opposition to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) "Food Safety Modernization Act", or S. 510, the Senate voted 73 to 25 to pass the bill anyway. And data presented by Maplight.org, a nonprofit, nonpartisan research organization, shows that big industry groups and large food producers spent millions of dollars buying off Congressmen to garner support for it.

According to the site, Senators that ended up supporting the bill received nearly $10 million in political contributions from interest groups that also supported the bill. This amount was more than four times as much as groups opposed to the bill spent on overall contributions.  (READ ENTIRE ARTICLE)

To see a full list of the Senators who supported S. 510, visit:

http://www.naturalnews.com/030577_S...

The Health Tyrants: Codex Alimentarius, part 2

Brandon Turbeville
Activist Post
November 22, 2010
Excerpt from Codex Alimentarius — The End of Health Freedom
The health commission of Codex Alimentarius, and the subsequent legislation to come from it, has provable roots to Nazism, Communism, eugenics, and one-world government initiatives. Let’s put forth a few of the names and philosophies of the tyrants responsible for this proposed global health tyranny.

	The globalists plans of a one-world state built upon eugenics were not born with Adolph Hitler and they certainly did not die with him.

I.G. Farben was not isolated to Germany. Not only were they a conglomerate of Bayer, Hoechst, BASF and other companies, I.G. Farben was also welded to Shell Oil of Britain and Standard Oil and DuPont of the United States by 1929. This occurred after I.G. Farben discovered how to make petroleum out of coal. Subsequently, there was an agreement for I.G. Farben to stay out of the petroleum market if Standard Oil would stay out of the chemical market.[1]
Hermann Schmitz, who was chairman of the board for I.G. Farben, as mentioned above, had a large amount of stock in Standard Oil New Jersey, while the Rockefeller Foundation likewise owned a substantial amount of stock in I.G. Farben.[2] So much stock that when I.G. Farben’s holdings were completely sold off in 1962, the Rockefellers were the dominant holders involved in the transactions.[3] This is significant because the Rockefeller Foundation and the Rockefeller family in general were major supporters not just of the Nazi regime and eugenics, but the creation of the United Nations.[4]
Indeed, the connections between the Rockefellers and the atrocities of Nazi Germany, Communist Russia, and Communist China are so plentiful as to preclude them from being dealt with in much detail in this article. This evidence is readily available to anyone who wishes to investigate and is made much easier because, in large part, the Rockefellers do not deny it. In addition to open support for eugenics, the Rockefellers are also committed globalists, again a philosophy which is readily admitted. The Rockefeller connections to globalist organizations such as the United Nations,[5] the Council on Foreign Relations,[6] and the Trilateral Commission[7] to name a few are widely documented and discussed. Indeed, it was John D. Rockefeller that donated the land on which the United Nations headquarters was built.[8]
As one digs deeper and deeper into the history of the United Nations and even the concept of globalization itself, one encounters more and more of the Rockefeller family tree along the way. It eventually becomes obvious that the Rockefellers, along with other elite families, had a vested interest in the creation of an international governing body as well as a powerful hand in its creation through organizations such as those mentioned above, specifically the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg Group, and the Royal Institute of International Affairs.[9] All of these groups and organizations exist for the stated purpose of world government, with the UN in particular being a vital piece of the infrastructure used to facilitate it. Indeed, much evidence has shown definite links between these organizations and the creation of the United Nations. (READ ENTIRE ARTICLE)

Senate Bill 510 Food Safety? The FDA has killed far more people than contaminated eggs or lettuce

Saturday, November 20, 2010
by Mike Adams, the Health Ranger
Editor of NaturalNews.com (See all articles...)

(NaturalNews) Proponents of Senate Bill 510 -- the Food Safety and Modernization Act -- keep trying to claim that we need the FDA to protect us from tainted eggs, lettuce, onions and spinach. On the surface, it seems like a reasonable argument: No one should ever die from unsafe food in America, right?

But to accomplish a net reduction in deaths, you'd need to grant power over the food supply to some organization that actually respects human life... and the FDA is not that organization. In fact, as we have documented here on NaturalNews over the last seven years, the FDA is responsible for far more deaths of Americans than all the terrorist events in the history of the world -- combined!

How is that so?

How the FDA has killed millions of Americans
Well, for starters, the FDA has a long and rather dubious history of keeping dangerous, deadly drugs on the market even after it knows those drugs are killing people. The FDA has even gone out of its way to ignore critical evidence about dangerous drugs in order to appease its Big Pharma clients and keep those high-profit drugs selling while people are dying.

To see one example of this, look at the history of Vioxx -- a drug the FDA kept on the market while it racked up well over 60,000 deaths according to the FDA's own scientists! (http://www.naturalnews.com/011401_D...)

As Dr David Graham said in an interview, "The FDA is responsible for 140,000 heart attacks and 60,000 dead Americans. That's as many people as were killed in the Vietnam War. Yet the FDA points the finger at me and says, Well, this guy's a rat, you can't trust him,' but nobody is calling them to account. Congress isn't calling them to account."

If you want more evidence of the FDA's outrageous disregard for human life, look at the agency's handling of the drug Ketek (http://www.naturalnews.com/019698.html). Or check out how the FDA kept the liver-damaging drug Rezulin on the market while diabetic Americans were dropping dead.

The FDA's own scientists have repeatedly accused the agency of engaging in routine intimidation of scientists who try to call attention to dangerous products (http://www.naturalnews.com/025298_t...).

The FDA censors natural remedies that could save lives
On top of all that corruption and fraud leading to negligent deaths caused by the FDA, this agency also censors the scientific truth about natural remedies and nutritional supplements that could save millions of lives each year. The FDA won't, for example, allow vitamin D supplement companies to tell the truth about how vitamin D prevents cancer or how vitamin D prevents the flu and makes seasonal flu vaccines obsolete (http://www.naturalnews.com/029760_v...).

The FDA also won't allow any supplement companies to tell the truth about their natural remedies for preventing or even reversing diabetes, heart disease, breast cancer and more.

In doing this, the FDA is complicit in the deaths of at least 250,000 Americans each year. According to the groundbreaking 2003 medical report Death by Medicine, by Drs Gary Null, Carolyn Dean, Martin Feldman, Debora Rasio and Dorothy Smith, 783,936 people in the United States die every year from conventional medicine mistakes. The FDA has a hand in at least one-third of those deaths, mostly from its willful corruption and fraud in the world of deadly pharmaceuticals, which have proven to be far more deadly than terrorists (http://www.naturalnews.com/009278.html).

If you do the math on all this, you are forced to reach some startling mathematical conclusions:

• The FDA is more dangerous than all the terrorists and terror events in the history of the United States.

• The FDA has killed more Americans than the entire Vietnam War.

• Even more than that, over the last 20 years the FDA has killed more Americans than the total number who died in World War I, World War II, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and even the Civil War -- combined!

• The FDA is the single most deadly agency that has ever existed in the history of the United States. It is responsible for more body bags, more funerals, more pain and suffering than even the Department of Defense!

• The FDA does not value human life. It has no compassion for real people. It is driven by politics and money, and it answers to the demands of powerful corporations who control its agenda (http://www.naturalnews.com/019497.html).  (READ ENTIRE ARTICLE)

How to brand a disease -- and sell a cure

By Carl Eliott |

CNN | Oct. 11, 2010

Editor's note: Dr. Carl Elliott, an M.D. and Ph.D., is the author of "White Coat, Black Hat: Adventures on the Dark Side of Medicine" (Beacon Press, 2010).

(CNN) -- If you want to understand the way prescription drugs are marketed today, have a look at the 1928 book, "Propaganda," by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations in America.
For Bernays, the public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. When Bernays was working as a salesman for Mozart pianos, for example, he did not simply place advertisements for pianos in newspapers. That would have been too obvious.

Instead, Bernays persuaded reporters to write about a new trend: Sophisticated people were putting aside a special room in the home for playing music. Once a person had a music room, Bernays believed, he would naturally think of buying a piano. As Bernays wrote, "It will come to him as his own idea."
Just as Bernays sold pianos by selling the music room, pharmaceutical marketers now sell drugs by selling the diseases that they treat. The buzzword is "disease branding."
To brand a disease is to shape its public perception in order to make it more palatable to potential patients. Panic disorder, reflux disease, erectile dysfunction, restless legs syndrome, bipolar disorder, overactive bladder, ADHD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, even clinical depression: All these conditions were once regarded as rare until a marketing campaign transformed the brand.
Once a branded disease has achieved a degree of cultural legitimacy, there is no need to convince anyone that a drug to treat it is necessary. It will come to him as his own idea.
Disease branding works especially well for two kinds of conditions. The first is the shameful condition that can be destigmatized. For instance, when Pharmacia launched Detrol in the late 1990s, the condition the drug treated was known to doctors as "urge incontinence." Patients called it "accidentally peeing in my pants" and were embarrassed to bring it up with their physicians.
Pharmacia fixed the problem by rebranding the condition as "overactive bladder." Whereas "incontinence" suggested weakness and was associated mainly with elderly women, the phrase "overactive bladder" evoked a supercharged organ frantically working overtime.
To qualify for a diagnosis of "overactive bladder," patients did not actually have to lose bladder control." They simply needed to go to the bathroom a lot.
The vice president of Pharmacia, Neil Wolf, explained the branding strategy in a 2002 presentation called "Positioning Detrol: Creating a Disease." By creating the disease of "overactive bladder," Wolf claimed, Pharmacia created a market of 21 million potential patients.
Another good candidate for branding is a condition that can be plausibly portrayed as under-diagnosed. Branding such a condition assures potential patients that they are part of a large and credible community of sufferers. For example, in 1999, the FDA approved the antidepressant Paxil for the treatment of "social anxiety disorder," a condition previously known as "shyness."
(READ MORE)