Summary: The problem of disease mongering is attracting increasing attention, though an adequate working definition remains elusive. Disease mongering is the selling of sickness that widens the boundaries of illness and grows the markets for those who sell and deliver treatments. It is exemplified most explicitly by many pharmaceutical industry funded disease–awareness campaigns, more often designed to sell drugs than to illuminate or to inform or educate about the prevention of illness or the maintenance of health. Different forms of disease mongering practices has been identified like aspects of ordinary life, such as menopause, being medicalised; mild problems portrayed as serious illnesses and risk factors, such as high blood cholesterol and low bone density being framed as diseases. Drug companies are by no means the only players in this drama. Informal alliances of pharmaceutical corporations, public relations companies, doctors’ groups, and patient advocates promote these ideas to the public and policymakers, often using mass media to push a certain view of a particular health problem. While these different stakeholders may come to these alliances with different motives, there is a confluence of interests resulting in health problems routinely being framed as widespread, severe, and treatable with pills. Currently, these alliances are working with the media to popularize little–known conditions thus lending credence to inflated prevalence estimates. This is happening at a time when pharmaceutical companies perceive a need to build and maintain markets for their big–selling products and when pipelines for new and genuinely innovative medicines are perceived as being weak. Like the marketing strategies that drive it, disease mongering poses a global challenge to those interested in public health, demanding in turn a global response. A much more vigorous effort is needed from within civil society to understand and to challenge this corporate process.