Disease mongering has become so routine and so successful in modern medicine that drug companies actually depend on inventing new diseases as a way to ensure future profits. It's not enough to sell drugs to people who are truly sick, you see. Big Pharma cleverly figured out that they could sell even MORE drugs if they simply invented new diseases and convinced people they needed pharmaceuticals to treat those diseases. The FDA, always happy to serve the profit interests of Big Pharma, went right along with the ploy and legalized television and magazine drug ads in 1997. Since then, drug sales have skyrocketed, drug company profits have ballooned, and fictitious disease diagnoses have proliferated at an alarming rate. Diseases such as Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and Social Anxiety Disorder are completely fictitious, invented by a panel of psychiatrists with a simple vote. Conditions like "high cholesterol" aren't diseases at all (they're simply descriptions of blood chemistry), and artificially lowering high cholesterol with statin drugs has been scientifically found to offer absolutely no net health benefit whatsoever. Breast cancer is so frequently misdiagnosed that for every one woman helped by cancer screening and treatment, ten are harmed by it (click here for the story), and Restless Legs Syndrome is so routinely marketed and hyped that people who hadn't even heard of the disease two years ago now think they need patented chemicals to treat it. By any honest assessment, pharmaceutical medicine today is all a grand hoax. (Click here to read my article exploring the massive "hoax" of drug advertising.) In this CounterThink cartoon, I decided to show what goes on behind the scenes at Disease Mongers, Inc., a firm hired by drug companies to invent, package and market new diseases that can be used to sell more drugs. The fascinating thing here is that this comic is not a parody. The scene is remarkably accurate! Drug companies actually do hire firms to invent diseases (although they aren't called, "Disease Mongers, Inc."), and people really do sit around dreaming up disease names that they think might be swallowed by the public, the media and the FDA.

Inventing new diseases is child's play

How easy is it to come up with a fictitious disease or disorder that the public will think is real? It's incredibly easy! I even wrote a web tool that will generate new diseases for you at the click of a button. Simply visit my Disease Mongering Engine and you can get filthy rich inventing your own fictitious diseases starting right now! I'm not the only one who has come up with hilarious ways to make fun of disease mongering by the drug industry. Justine Cooper created an entire website dedicated to a fictitious disease and a fake drug for treating it. The site, www.Havidol.com, claims to be a patient education site for Dysphoric Social Attention Consumption Deficit Anxiety Disorder, or DSCDAD for short. Not surprisingly, the public bought it, and she has been contacted by hundreds of people wanting to know where they can buy the drug to treat their DSCDAD. (Didn't they get the drug name, "Havidol?" As in, "Have it all!") Even some members of the media fell for the hoax, reporting DSCDAD as a real disease requiring treatment with Havidol. In another parody on YouTube, artists created a fake commercial for, "Motivational Deficiency Disorder" (formerly known as just being plain lazy) and recommended drugs for treatment. Click here to see the video yourself. Back in 2005, I even made up my own list of fictitious diseases, including Obsessive Hosiery Dislocation Disorder (i.e. losing your socks in the laundry). Click here to read my full list of fictitious diseases.

A nation of hypochondriacs

The bottom line in all this? Drug advertising has turned America into a nation of hypochondriacs. By simply inventing some disease name, then getting easy FDA approval for a drug to "treat" it, drug companies can create a billion-dollar market where none existed previously. All they have to do is convince everyone they're sick or diseased, and given the complete lack of medical skepticism among consumers, doctors and regulators these days, that's frighteningly easy. This fraudulent Big Pharma recipe for making money is so effective that the industry is now increasingly focusing on marketing diseases. If a so-called "disease" can be swallowed by the gullible mainstream media, and believed by brainwashed doctors and consumers, then drug sales will automatically follow. Getting people to believe there's something wrong with them, of course, is amazingly easy. Why? Because everybody's life is in turmoil at one time or another. There's not a person alive who doesn't feel pressure, or anxiety, or challenges, or failures sooner or later. Drug companies want you to believe those feelings are diseases when, in reality, they're just part of life. Drug companies essentially want to diseasify every emotion, habit and experience of human living. Falling asleep and waking up -- once regarded as natural human behaviors -- are now pharmacologically regulated with profitable drugs. Pregnancy is now considered a medical condition, and new HPV vaccination efforts go to such extremes that they "preemptively treat" a disease that a young girl might someday possibly get decades later.

What's next: Mandatory "treatment" for everyone

And until this drug cartel is stopped, the situation will only get worse. Soon, mandatory mental health screening programs will sweep across America, and anyone who displays independent thinking, creative ideas or even the slightest hint of stress might be carted off to a mental institution where they will be forced to undergo brain chemistry "rebalancing" at the whim of a psychiatrist who earns a commission on every pill he forces you to swallow. Sound far-fetched? Don't jump to innocent conclusions. You probably have no idea how far Big Pharma will go to turn human beings into customers. Drugging the entire nation with patented chemicals is only part of the goal. The real goal is to drug everyone with multiple drugs that don't treat or cure anything, but only "manage" symptoms while keeping people alive long enough to keep them paying. Remember The Matrix? Today, the United States is inching ever closer to a Medical Matrix, where consumers are enslaved in a system of chemical control in order to turn a human being into profit machine. If you think there's anything resembling "health" or "care" in our modern health care system, you're dangerously underinformed. The system is an out-of-control profit-accumulating machine that, right now, harms far more people than it helps. It has become a corporate empire where profits, not patients, come first. And drug companies now exercise astonishing degrees of control over the FDA, the USDA, the DEA, medical schools, doctors, media outlets and non-profit groups.

The way out

How do we end this medical madness? First, we've all got to come to our senses and stop believing every mood, habit or challenge in our lives is caused by some mysterious disorder. People need to start taking responsibility for their own behavior and stop blaming fictitious diseases (or bad genes) when things don't work out the way they want. Secondly, we've got to end the ridiculous practice of direct-to-consumer drug advertising. There is absolutely no justifiable reason why prescription drugs should be marketed directly to patients on television. It is only allowed because it is profitable, not because it serves any scientifically justifiable function in society. And third, it's time to conduct a serious investigation into the crimes against America that have been committed by top FDA officials. These bureaucrats have deliberately neglected their responsibility to the American people and have, instead, sought to protect and expand drug company profits, no matter who gets harmed or killed in the process. FDA officials have attacked natural health remedies, outlawed perfectly safe herbs and supplements, and have in fact conspired with drug companies to bury evidence demonstrating the dangers of their FDA-approved pharmaceuticals (among other crimes). It's time we cleaned house at the FDA and prosecuted the criminals currently in charge there. We need a Nuremberg trial for the FDA where the crimes against humanity that have been committed by the agency are made public and accounted for. If we don't put an end to this absurd disease mongering epidemic that is sweeping the world, it won't be long until we wake up and find ourselves chemical slaves of an all-powerful drug cartel that runs government, medicine, media and education. The time to stop drug companies is NOW, before they gain an even tighter grip over the laws, regulations and information outlets that dominate society today. If we end this medical madness now, and outlaw drug advertising while prosecuting the criminals responsible for overmedicating America, we may have a chance at a better future with drastically reduced health care costs. It's going to take courage, honesty and ethics to get this done, but the alternative is to lose our nation to a dark future of medical tyranny, bankruptcy and despair. Conventional medicine, as practiced today, has truly become the No. 1 obstacle to the health of the American people. Get medicine out of the way, and we would all be healthier, happier and better off.