How to brand a disease -- and sell a cure

(CNN) -- If you want to understand the way prescription drugs are marketed today, have a look at the 1928 book, "Propaganda," by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations in America.

For Bernays, the public relations business was less about selling things than about creating the conditions for things to sell themselves. When Bernays was working as a salesman for Mozart pianos, for example, he did not simply place advertisements for pianos in newspapers. That would have been too obvious.

Instead, Bernays persuaded reporters to write about a new trend: Sophisticated people were putting aside a special room in the home for playing music. Once a person had a music room, Bernays believed, he would naturally think of buying a piano. As Bernays wrote, "It will come to him as his own idea."

Just as Bernays sold pianos by selling the music room, pharmaceutical marketers now sell drugs by selling the diseases that they treat. The buzzword is "disease branding."

To brand a disease is to shape its public perception in order to make it more palatable to potential patients. Panic disorder, reflux disease, erectile dysfunction, restless legs syndrome, bipolar disorder, overactive bladder, ADHD, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, even clinical depression: All these conditions were once regarded as rare until a marketing campaign transformed the brand.

Once a branded disease has achieved a degree of cultural legitimacy, there is no need to convince anyone that a drug to treat it is necessary. It will come to him as his own idea...

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Patients Wary of Doctors' Pharma Relationships
Most U.S. Patients Think Drug Companies Influence Their Doctors, Survey Says

Many patients taking prescription drugs believe that pharmaceutical companies have too much influence over their physicians' prescribing practices, according to a new survey.

A telephone survey by Consumer Reports found that the majority of those currently taking medications -- 69 percent -- had such concerns.

About half of the medication users believed that their doctors were too eager to write a prescription when other non-pharmacological options are available...

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Drug Label Accuracy Getting Lost In Translation

NEW YORK — Computer programs pharmacists rely on to translate prescription labels for non-English speaking customers often produce potentially harmful errors, new research indicates.

Examples include translating "once a day" into "eleven times a day"; replacing "by mouth" with "by the little"; and translating "two times" into "two kiss." While nearly all of the pharmacies surveyed in the study said pharmacists checked label printouts for accuracy, most of these pharmacists weren't fluent in Spanish.

The consequences of such errors are "immediately apparent and frightening to any physician," Dr. Iman Sharif and Julia Tse, who conducted the research, note in the journal Pediatrics. There has been at least one documented case of such consequences, they add; a man who was supposed to take his two blood pressure medications once a day took 11 pills of each instead. (The word "once" in English means "eleven" in Spanish.)...