The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain

by Daniel Gardner

Critics call it “disease mongering.” Australians Roy Moynihan and David Henry, a journalist and a pharmacologist, respectively, wrote in the April 2006 edition of the journal Public Library of Science Medicine that “many of the so-called disease awareness campaigns that inform contemporary understanding of illness—whether as citizens, journalists, academics or policymakers—are underwritten by the marketing departments of large drug companies rather than by organizations with a primary interest in public health. And it is no secret that those same marketing depart– ments contract advertising agencies with expertise in ‘condition branding,’ whose skills include ‘fostering the creation’ of new medical disorders and dysfunctions.”