Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients.
“Should be required reading for ALL women and girls!”
“Selling Sickness pulls back the curtain on the politically-charged (and financially inspired) machinations of the pharmaceutical industry and explains the mass manipulation. It’s a very disturbing book, but also well documented, well researched and utterly fascinating. Read it and weep – for America’s health care system.”
— Rosemary Thornton, Amazon.com Review
Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients
This accessible study about the collusion between medical science and the drug industry emphasizes how drug companies market their products by either redefining problems as diseases (like female sexual dysfunction) or redefining a condition to encompass a greater percentage of the population.
Moynihan, a health journalist for the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, and Cassels, a Canadian science writer, note, for instance, that eight of the nine specialists who wrote the 2004 federal guideline on high cholesterol, which substantially increased the number of people in that category, have multiple financial ties to drug manufacturers.
Science and medicine writers Moynihan and Cassels conjecture that most Americans believe, based on information gleaned from a deluge of pharmaceutical-company advertisements, that conditions such as hypertension, high cholesterol, menopause, and chronic constipation are bona fide diseases.
They quote reputable medical experts, however, who refute such understandings. What’s more, they suggest that billions of precious and diminishing health-care dollars are squandered treating those non-diseases of healthy, wealthy Americans and would be better spent treating the legitimately sick poor and fighting the international AIDS epidemic.
Quoting former Merck CEO Henry Gadsen — who, in a 1976 Fortune article, confessed that, “…it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. Because then, Merck would be able to sell to everyone”
— they lay the blame for the misdirected billions at the feet of just such pharmaceutical giants as Merck. Finally, they counterpoint glossy pharmaceutical ad campaigns with alternatives that consumers may consider before asking their doctors for prescription drugs they saw touted on TV.
Physicians now routinely prescribe cholesterol-lowering pills (statins) that may have perilous side effects, when many people could lower their risk of heart attack with less costly and dangerous steps, such as exercise and improved diet. Through aggressive merchandising, funding of medical conferences and expensive perks, drug companies win doctors over to diagnosing these “diseases” and prescribing drugs for them.
Much of this territory has been covered by several books in the past year most notably Marcia Angell’s, The Truth About the Drug Companies; but this is still an excellent exposé of 10 or more examples of manufactured or exaggerated illness, from adult attention deficit disorder to osteoporosis.
If this is your first exposure to the secret life of Big Pharma, their secret ownership of some patient support groups, their control of much of Continuing Medical Education, the capture of the FDA and other agencies through Pharma’s legendary lobbying machine will shock and sadden you. Every American needs to understand how Big Pharma’s use of public relations firms to create fear of some normal condition, followed by overwrought promotions of drugs and the systematic concealment of drug side-effects manipulates them and is a primary factor in the spiraling cost of health care. Even if you know about this American disgrace, there are many aspects that may be new to you, so read this book.
Then do something!
Don’t Get Angry — Get Active!
You can start by doing independent research on any drug recommended by your health care professional.
It’s your body and you are ultimately responsible for what you put in it or on it.
