An article on the Beeb’s website entitled: Life: A medical condition has addressed the growing trend of psychoanalysts wanting to categorize all aspects of human behaviour as some form of abnormality.

New “disorders” (which in that annoyingly American style always seem to have a 3-letter acronym) are being “identified” on a daily basis by the psychobabble brigade, all of whom are keen to make their mark in the American Psychiatric Association ‘bible’ and then reap the material rewards from the book deals, lecture circuit tours, overpriced consulting and other pseudo-academic bollocks that invariably follows.

And of course, every new disorder has to have it’s own drug, because America has been conditioned to believe that all of life’s problems can be solved with a pill. The pharma multinationals are keen to oblige which probably explains why an estimated 10% of US children take Ritalin to combat behaviour problems.

Here in jolly old Blighty, home of the stiff upper lip we are doing almost as badly: ten percent of British kids are now regarded as having a clinically recognisable mental disorder and 34 million prescriptions for anti-depressants were written in the UK alone in 2007.

If you listen carefully, you can hear the cash registers ringing…

But ironically, at the same time as drug companies who hold the patents for Ritalin, Prozac and other such medications are making a fortune, plans to make a polypill available to all men aged over 50 and women aged over 60 in order to drastically reduce instances of heart attacks and strokes have been met with almost total indifference by the pharma industry.

The polypill (rather badly dubbed the “magic bullet” by the press pundits) is a simple cocktail of:-

• 100mg Aspirin
• 20mg Simvastatin: statin to lower cholesterol
• 12.5 mg Hydrochlorothiazide: diuretic to remove excess water from tissues
• 5mg Ramipril: relaxes arterial muscles
• 50mg Atenolol: beta blocker to regulate the heartbeat

All the ingredients are freely available and therefore very cheap to produce (because the patents have all expired). There is a wealth of scientific evidence proving their benefits as individual components. As a single compound, the evidence from initial human trials is very positive, with positive benefits (including sharply reducing cholesterol and blood pressure levels). Researchers say the the pill has the potential to “halve cardiovascular events in average middle-aged individuals”.

And yet not one western drug company has expressed an interest in handling the manufacture and distribution of the polypill.

At least any lingering doubt about where the true loyalty of the drug industry lies is now resolved.

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