Drug companies are by no means the only players in this drama. Through the work of investigative journalists, we have learned how informal alliances of pharmaceutical corporations, public relations companies, doctors' groups, and patient advocates promote these ideas to the public and policymakers—often using mass media to push a certain view of a particular health problem. While these different stakeholders may come to these alliances with different motives, there is often a confluence of interests—resulting in health problems routinely being framed as widespread, severe, and treatable with pills, as has happened recently with social anxiety disorder [5]. Currently, these alliances are working with the media to popularize little-known conditions, such as restless legs syndrome [6] and female sexual dysfunction [7], in each case lending credence to inflated prevalence estimates. In the case of female sexual dysfunction, there has been a serious, though heavily contested, attempt to convince the public in the United States that 43% of women live with this condition (see pp. 175–195 in [2]). This is happening at a time when pharmaceutical companies perceive a need to build and maintain markets for their big-selling products and when pipelines for new and genuinely innovative medicines are perceived as being weak.
More …
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030191