The 2006 conference that named disease mongering
Disease mongering is the widening of the boundaries of illness, or the promotion of new diagnoses, to expand the market for treatment, and the phrase entered wide circulation largely through a single historical event: the first academic conference devoted to the subject, held in Newcastle, New South Wales, Australia, in April 2006. This page gives a neutral account of that event as a moment in the history of the idea. It is important to state plainly at the outset that this reference is not that conference, is not run by its organizers, and is not a revival or continuation of it. It describes the meeting in its own words and reproduces none of its programme or abstracts. Nothing here is medical advice.
What the conference was
The Inaugural Conference on Disease Mongering brought together researchers, clinicians, journalists, and health-policy scholars to examine how ordinary life, normal variation, and mere risk factors get reframed as treatable illness. Convened in Newcastle in association with academics at the University of Newcastle, it was the first time the loose body of criticism around medicalization and pharmaceutical marketing was gathered under the single banner of “disease mongering” at a scholarly meeting. Its purpose was to define the phenomenon, examine specific cases, and consider what patients, clinicians, and regulators might do about it.
The meeting is remembered less for any one announcement than for consolidating a scattered debate into a recognized field. By naming disease mongering as the theme of an academic gathering, it signaled that the topic had moved beyond individual books and articles into organized study.
Why 2006 was a turning point
The conference did not stand alone. It was timed to coincide with a themed collection of peer-reviewed articles on disease mongering published by the open-access journal PLoS Medicine in April 2006. The pairing of a live meeting with a freely available body of scholarship gave the term a durable footing: journalists could report the event, and researchers could cite the collection. Together they marked the point at which “disease mongering” shifted from a striking phrase into a subject with a literature, a set of named mechanisms, and a roster of documented cases.
The timing also built on a decade of groundwork. Lynn Payer had coined the term in 1992, and the journalists Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels had brought it to a mass readership with Selling Sickness in 2005, following Moynihan’s influential 2002 article in the BMJ. The 2006 meeting can be read as the moment this earlier work found an institutional home.
The themes it examined
Although this page does not reproduce the conference’s programme, the general subjects it engaged are a matter of public record and match the concerns of the wider field. Participants discussed, in broad terms:
- How diagnostic thresholds for common measures, such as blood pressure and cholesterol, are set and lowered, and who takes part in setting them.
- How risk factors are recast as diseases, so that a number predicting future harm becomes a present diagnosis.
- How pharmaceutical marketing, including awareness campaigns and direct-to-consumer advertising where it is permitted, shapes public perception of what counts as illness.
- How medicalization affects specific groups and conditions across the lifespan, from ordinary aging to everyday psychological distress.
- What responses might reduce overdiagnosis and overtreatment without denying care to people who genuinely need it.
These themes have since become the standard agenda of related initiatives, and the debate has continued in venues such as the BMJ “Too Much Medicine” campaign and the Preventing Overdiagnosis conference series, which carry forward the questions the Newcastle meeting helped to frame.
How it fits the larger history
Placed in sequence, the milestones show how an idea matured. Payer supplied the name; Moynihan and Cassels supplied the cases and public reach; the 2006 conference and the PLoS Medicine collection supplied the academic gathering point.
| Year | Milestone | Contribution |
|---|---|---|
| 1992 | Lynn Payer, Disease-Mongers | Coins the term; frames it as a system of incentives |
| 2002 | Moynihan, Heath and Henry, BMJ article | Sets out mechanisms and a taxonomy of cases |
| 2005 | Moynihan and Cassels, Selling Sickness | Brings the idea to a mass readership |
| 2006 | Newcastle conference and PLoS Medicine collection | Consolidates the debate into an academic field |
Reading the event today
Understood neutrally, the 2006 conference was a naming and gathering moment, valuable precisely because it organized existing criticism rather than because it delivered a single verdict. The balanced view that the field has since adopted was already implicit in its agenda: medicalization brings real benefits as well as real harms, and the task is to tell the difference case by case rather than to condemn medicine wholesale. This reference carries that spirit forward independently. For the concept itself, see the pillar overview of disease mongering; for the mechanisms, the tactics page; and for the plain-language definition, What is disease mongering?