I used to work as a technologist in a sleep lab. 'restless leg syndrome' is not some disease to shill drugs. It fucks people up quite badly by preventing them from sleeping properly.
Whether it was either just enough to stop them from getting to the deeper, restorative levels of sleep, or bad enough that they had to get out of bed and walk around for a couple of hours, restless leg syndrome is a clear blight on quality of life. Sure, it may not be fatal (except where increased tiredness is generally), but it's still a significant health issue to be afflicted by.
Hmm interesting. I understood it to be a made-up disease so people can 'talk to their doctors about it' and pay for medications. Basically pharma companies drumming up business by inventing diseases. How common is it? I had _never_ heard of it. I heard of heart disease, cancer, other things, I have plenty of doctors and nurses in my family. Never heard of RLS, until I started seeing commercials about.
Also wouldn't you working in a sleep clinic skew your perspective on how widespread the thing is? In other words you would only see people who have problems sleeping.
Sleep medicine is an extremely young field, beginning in earnest only in the 80s and 90s. It's not surprising that folks haven't heard of sleep disorders. Go back 10 years and ask if people had heard of sleep apnoea and you'll get a lot of puzzled looks too.
Also, I didn't say anything about how widespread it was - I said it fucked people up and it's not a pseudodisease.
It's not to say that there aren't overprescription issues, just don't fall into the Prozac trap - just because something's overprescribed doesn't mean there isn't a real disease around.
From what I and my fiance (pharmacist) have been able to gather about it, RLS only seems to occur in people taking a specific heart medication. So they (Merck I believe) made another drug to treat their own side effects.
Good to know. The correlation seemed very strong, so I'm glad to know it's not all just a result of this drug. She came to the conclusion after she noticed every single customer that came in for RLS medicine was taking this other Merck medication. Not proof, but it was there.
Whether it was either just enough to stop them from getting to the deeper, restorative levels of sleep, or bad enough that they had to get out of bed and walk around for a couple of hours, restless leg syndrome is a clear blight on quality of life. Sure, it may not be fatal (except where increased tiredness is generally), but it's still a significant health issue to be afflicted by.