Disease awareness or disease mongering?

Ya' know, I've seen quite a few ads (mostly on TV) that talk about various medical conditions that either I'd never heard of until recently or never really considered to be "diseases," etc. Now it seems there's a term for this: disease mongering .....

Recently, some pharmaceutical companies have stepped up their use of unbranded ads whose messages focus only on the medical condition -- e,g., erectile dysfunction (ED) -- that the branded product treats with no mention of the brand. The industry calls these "disease awareness" ads. Some industry critics, however, call it "disease mongering."
"[Disease Mongering"] is exemplified mostly explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry-funded disease awareness campaigns - more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health."

What is "Disease Mongering"? "Disease mongering" -- according to a paper written on the subject in the PLoS Report above -- is "the effort by pharmaceutical companies (or others with similar financial interests) to enlarge the market for a treatment by convincing people that they are sick and need medical intervention." Some "diseases" that the authors of the report consider "mongered" include:

Restless leg syndrome - Prevalence of rare condition exaggerated
Irritable bowel syndrome - Promoted as a serious illness needing therapy, when usually a mild problem
Menopause - Too often medicalised as a disorder when really a normal part of life

One of the authors (of the report) -- Ray Moyniham, visiting editor and contributor to the British Medical Journal -- is also co-author of the book "Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients."

Nice to see some confirmation from the medical community that it's not just my imagination - they really are trying to make me feel bad or "inadequate," mainly to sell me more of their high-profit margin drugs. Jus' don't seem right to me ....

(quote above from the "Pharma Marketing Blog")