Lifestyle drug
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Lifestyle drug is an imprecise term commonly applied to medications which treat non-life threatening and non-painful conditions such as baldness, impotence, wrinkles, or acne, which the speaker perceives as either not medical problems at all or as minor medical conditions relative to others. It is sometimes intended as a pejorative, bearing the implication that the scarce medical research resources allocated to develop such drugs were spent frivolously when they could have been better spent researching cures for more serious medical conditions. Proponents, however, point out that improving the patient's subjective quality of life has always been a primary concern of medicine, and argue that these drugs are doing just that. It finds broad use in both media and scholarly journals.
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