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Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8826

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

 

Publication type: book

Moynihan R, Cassels A.
Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients
New York: Nation Books 2005
http://web.archive.org/web/20070416141611/http://www.nationbooks.org/book.mhtml?t=sickness


Abstract:

As everyday life becomes increasingly medicalized – ordinary ups and downs becoming mental disorders, common complaints transformed into serious medical conditions—the pharmaceutical industry moves ever closer to the dream of Henry Gadsen, the head of the giant drug company Merck who once told Fortune magazine that he wanted Merck to become more like chewing gum maker Wrigley’s: if Merck could make drugs for healthy people, it could “sell to everyone.” Selling to everyone by exploiting our deepest fears of death, decay and disease is now what drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on earth.

Runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder and hyperactive children have ADD, while being “at risk” for conditions like high cholesterol or low-bone density is sold as a disease in itself. Selling Sickness reveals how more and more ordinary people are turned into patients through the marketing strategies of the world’s largest drug companies, which are aggressively targeting the healthy.

Ray Moynihan is one of the world’s leading health writers, specializing in the business of medicine. Currently a visiting editor and contributor with the British Medical Journal, his writing has been published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet. Among his many awards was a Harkness Fellowship, taken at Harvard University in 1999.

Alan Cassels is a pharmaceutical policy researcher at the University of Victoria, British Columbia. He studies how clinical research information and experience on prescription drugs gets communicated to policy makers and consumers. His insights into the media coverage of new drugs make him a sought-after commentator for CBC, the Globe and Mail and other national news agencies.

 

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Far too large a section of the treatment of disease is to-day controlled by the big manufacturing pharmacists, who have enslaved us in a plausible pseudo-science...
The blind faith which some men have in medicines illustrates too often the greatest of all human capacities - the capacity for self deception...
Some one will say, Is this all your science has to tell us? Is this the outcome of decades of good clinical work, of patient study of the disease, of anxious trial in such good faith of so many drugs? Give us back the childlike trust of the fathers in antimony and in the lancet rather than this cold nihilism. Not at all! Let us accept the truth, however unpleasant it may be, and with the death rate staring us in the face, let us not be deceived with vain fancies...
we need a stern, iconoclastic spirit which leads, not to nihilism, but to an active skepticism - not the passive skepticism, born of despair, but the active skepticism born of a knowledge that recognizes its limitations and knows full well that only in this attitude of mind can true progress be made.
- William Osler 1909