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Selling Sickness

Posted: Wed Mar 08, 2006 11:06 pm
by NHE
I just finished reading Selling Sickness by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels and I wanted to recommend it. The book is well written and documented. It discusses problems with health care that stem from the pharmaceutical industry's financial influence over everything from doctor and patient education, patient support groups, to the very creation and marketing of "new disease conditions" in order to broaden their potential market for both new and old drugs.

Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All Into Patients. Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels. Nation Books, 2005.

Quoted from the book’s inside sleeve:
Thirty years ago, Henry Gadsden, the head of Merck, one of the world’s largest drug companies, told Fortune magazine that he wanted Merck to be more like chewing gum maker Wrigley’s. It had long been his dream, he said, to make drugs for healthy people - so that Merck could "sell to everyone."

Gadsden’s dream now drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on earth.

Using their dominating influence in the world of medical science, drug companies are systematically working to widen the very boundaries that define illness. Old conditions are expanded, new ones created, and the markets for medication grow ever larger. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness and common complaints are labeled as medial conditions requiring drug treatments. Runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder, and hyperactive children have ADD. When it comes to conditions like high cholesterol or low bone density, being "at risk" is sold as a disease in its own right.

Selling Sickness reveals how widening the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments is creating millions of new patients and billions in new profits, in turn threatening to bankrupt health-care systems all over the world. As more and more of ordinary life becomes medicalized, the industry moves ever closer to Gadsden’s dream: "selling to everyone."
NHE

Posted: Wed Mar 15, 2006 10:01 pm
by remnants
Sounds very interesting! I will definitely pick up a copy.

-Cindy

Thanks for recommendation

Posted: Thu Mar 23, 2006 1:01 pm
by lyndacarol
Thanks to the recommendation from NHE, I have read Selling Sickness by Moynihan and Cassels. It was EXCELLENT! Now I can recommend it, too. I think I will even tell my physician about it!

Re: Selling Sickness/Overdosed America

Posted: Mon Mar 27, 2006 4:34 am
by NHE
lyndacarol wrote:Thanks to the recommendation from NHE, I have read Selling Sickness by Moynihan and Cassels. It was EXCELLENT! Now I can recommend it, too. I think I will even tell my physician about it!
It's good to hear that you appreciated the recommendation. :wink: You might also enjoy another book that I read last Fall titled Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine by Dr. John Abramson. It covers similar ground and is also well written. You can find more information about it and excerpts from some of the chapters at http://www.overdosedamerica.com.

NHE