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LONDON, Friday (Reuters)

So-called lifestyle drugs for baldness, erectile dysfunction or unhappiness are big business for pharmaceutical companies, but some doctors believe they are being coerced into treating a growing number of "non-diseases".

The British Medical Journal said on Friday a poll of its readers had identified almost 200 conditions that are not real sicknesses -- ranging from allergies to jet lag -- as more and more ordinary life conditions are redefined as medical problems.

The findings are controversial, with a number of doctors questioning whether debilitating conditions such as obesity and chronic fatigue syndrome -- also known as ME (myalgic encephalomyelitis) -- are true illnesses.

British and Australian medics writing in the influential journal said some drug companies were "disease-mongering" by widening the boundaries of treatable diseases in order to boost their markets.

BMJ editor Richard Smith said it was easy to create new diseases out of many of life's normal processes, such as ageing and sexuality. The challenge was to get the balance right between the under-treatment of some conditions and the over-treatment of others.

"Global pharmaceutical companies have a clear interest in medicalising life's problems, and there is now an ill for every pill," he wrote in an edition of the influential journal devoted to the subject.

"The concept of what is and what is not a disease is extremely slippery."

In the past 10 years, lifestyle drugs -- which improve the quality of life or alleviate the symptoms of old age -- have grown into a multibillion dollar business for pharmaceutical companies.

Pfizer Inc's Viagra for male impotence is a prime example. But the industry has also pushed back the boundaries by developing anti-depressants for social phobia, promoting treatments for baldness and pushing new disease categories such as attention deficit disorder.

Advances in genetics may aggravate matters, according to David Meltzer and Ron Zimmern of Cambridge University, since genomic science may soon define us all as patients, in need of correction for genetic "defects", which predispose us to certain diseases.

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