The “food chain” in health market: from ‘disease mongering’ to ‘doctor shopping’

Abstract

In recent years, different concepts have emerged in the medical literature, such as disease mongering, selling sickness and doctor shopping. These are three major phenomena of the current healthcare market, which is facing the challenge of increasing its profit with healthy people. In this sense, the interrelationships between these concepts have made the news: disease mongering feeds selling sickness, generating fears that impel a healthy person to seek reassurance in clinical procedures with unproven benefits. This search for the prevention or control of casual body alterations (which are normal, but conveyed as possibly pathological) inflates doctor shopping. This enhancer sequence of consumption growth is nothing but an authentic food chain. General practitioners, as the defence lawyers of their patients, would feel taken by the need to protect them against excessive and unnecessary interventions that would compromise their biopsychosocial well-being.