BLOGSCAN - Disease Mongering and Indefinite Use of Smoking Cessation Pharmaceuticals

On the Bioethics Forum, Dr Adriane Fugh-Berman and Dr Douglas Melnick discuss what appears to be the latest example of disease-mongering. An article in the Annals of Internal Medicine, written by authors with ties to companies that make pharmaceuticals for smoking cessation, argued that tobacco addiction should be reclassified as a chronic disease, such that patients should be expected to be on smoking cessation products indefinitely. Such indefinite use, of course, is unsupported by clinical evidence, but would create a huge new market for these drugs.