Pharma's top revenue streams include kids with ADHD (remaining on drugs until adulthood), people "living with mental illness," the obese and diabetic, those "at risk" of cardiovascular disease (who will take statins), and women.
Until 2003, approximately 61 million US women took hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for the "disease" of menopause, once called simple aging. Drugmakers increased the take by moving the "start date" for menopause ahead ten years through inventing the term "perimenopause." Then the wheels fell of the menopause franchise.
Remonetizing Menopause
When HRT was found to increase the risk of breast cancer by 26 percent, heart attacks by 29 percent, stroke by 41 percent and to double the risk of blood clots, millions of women quit. For a while, "hormone" was even a dirty word.
But Pharma could not let millions of women be non-customers.
Enter "non-hormonal" menopause treatments like the recently-marketed medicine Veozah for vasomotor symptoms or "VMS" as Pharma salespeople call it. There was just one problem with Veozah. The drug was linked to liver harm.
"We concluded this patient had liver injury as a result of Veozah (fezolinetant) treatment," noted the FDA about Astellas' vasomotor symptom drug. "Patients should stop taking Veozah immediately and contact your health care professional who prescribed the medicine if you experience signs and symptoms that suggest liver problems."
Now comes news that drugmakers have not quit their attempt to monetize menopause.
Bayer Seeks VMS Menopause Profits
Bayer is seeking approval for a similar VMS drug called elinzanetant, yes similar. The drug giant acquired elinzanetant with its acquisition of KaNDy Therapeutics Ltd., a UK-based biotech and added the drug to its women's healthcare development pipeline.
Already the pre-approval publicity has begun on pharma-stenography websites sites like MedPage Today--a new NONHORMONAL drug may treat menopause!!! Who are the researchers with the great news for women? One "researcher" is linked to Amgen, Astellas Pharma, AstraZeneca, Bayer, Genentech, Gilead Sciences, Merck Sharp & Dohme, Mylan, Novartis, Pfizer, Samsung, Sanofi, Teva and 10 more drugmakers.
As seen with the "miracle" obesity drugs, the GLP-1 agonists, drugmakers fund a drug trial, give it an acronym like the "BEST" trial and mainstream media repeat claims about the drug's effectiveness with no questions asked. Who needs to pay for advertising?
A new generation of women raised on "you're sick" drug ads that sell disease to sell drugs and don't remember deadly HRT therapy are also treated to documentaries like the "M Factor" that further monger the "disease" of menopause today. Even the Our Bodies Ourselves group, once the pinnacle of feminist health care, has embraced menopause as a disease. Ka-ching. The neo-mongerers say they are "Shredding the Silence on Menopause."
Will Bayer's new drug tank like Astellas' did? Will it harm women's livers? If so, you can be sure there will be a new offering that drugmakers can monger to women.
Meanwhile, there are ways women can stay healthy. Cliche though it is, healthful diets and daily or twice weekly exercise make a huge difference as do abstaining from junk food and prescription drugs. One reason women in poorer countries do no suffer from the "disease" of menopause as women in the US do is that fattening food and drugs are not marketed to them by rich corporations. To learn how they can avoid unethical drugmaker marketing, women can visit the following web sites.
Good luck
es.google.com/georgetown.edu/pharmedout/home
(Article changed on Jun 04, 2025 at 7:09 PM EDT)
(Article changed on Jun 05, 2025 at 12:46 PM EDT)
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