Big Pharma Pursues the Development of "Electroceuticals" with Google

One of the major goals of Big Pharma is to enlarge its customer base, which is to say, sell more product. One way to accomplish this is through the medicalization of "conditions" that previously have not been viewed as diseases. One example of such a condition is obesity. This medicalization process has also been referred to as "disease mongering" (see: Disease Mongering (i.e., Medicalization) by Pharmaceutical Companies; Medical Device Mongering, a Variant of Disease Mongering). The reason that Big Pharma spends huge amount of money each year on direct-to-consumer (DTC) advertisements on TV is to circumvent physicians by creating demand for prescription drugs among consumers (see: Effectiveness of "Direct-to-Consumer" Drug Advertisements). Although consumers can't write prescriptions, they can certainly request a particular drug from their physician. Given all of this, it should not be surprising that the pharmaceutical industry is  teaming up with Silicon Valley companies to develop wearable IT devices to monitor health. The details of a recent Google/Novartis deal were discussed in a recent article in the Financial Times (see: Big pharma teams up with big data). Below is an excerpt from it: Big pharma and Silicon Valley have been circling one another for some time, looking for ways in which they might harness the power of data technology to medical ends. Now a fusion of West Coast entrepreneurship and lab-coated medical e...
Source: Lab Soft News - Category: Pathologists Authors: Tags: Clinical Lab Industry News Clinical Lab Testing Healthcare Business Healthcare Delivery Lab Information Products Laboratory Industry Trends Medical Consumerism Medical Ethics Source Type: blogs