Surely you would think this does not go on in health? Think again. Pharmaceutical agents are approved for certain uses. If one can find new uses then new markets will open up. This can be tricky. Indeed the withdrawal some years ago of the drug Vioxx happened when a trial was being conducted on a potential new use for the drug. During this trial was when the risks of heart attack became apparent (some have argued this was known previously) and the rest is history.
A better way is to widen the market for existing use. The best example of this is with cholesterol lowering medications. Over the years the "normal" cut off has been gradually lowered. Every time the cut off is lowered a group of people are reclassified as "needing" drugs when the day before they did not. Similar reclassification of healthy people as those needing treatment occurs when blood pressure targets are lowered. Nobody dies of cholesterol; it is classed as a risk factor not a disease. Treating risk factors is good business, for the pharmaceutical industry. You are effectively getting life long customers, as "treatment" is long term. Compare this to an antibiotic maker. A person may need a course of an antibiotic but after one or two weeks that is it. You are off the drug.
The other beauty of treating risk factors is that there is no downside. If someone on a cholesterol-lowering drug has a heart attack you cannot blame the drug as it was only lowering risk not treating anything. If you do not the drug maker will claim you as a success in their statistics. The most commonly used cholesterol lowering medications are the statins. These have been around for 20 years. Some of the early ones are now off patent and Lipitor, the biggest seller will be off patent in a few years. They are huge sellers having generated sales of hundreds of billions of dollars.