Selling Sickness: How Drug Companies are Turning Us All into Patients Mass Market PDF

Rating: (49 reviews) Author: Visit Amazon's Ray Moynihan Page ISBN : 9781741145793 New from Format: PDF

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From Publishers Weekly

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. 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. Unfortunately for these authors, 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
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From Booklist

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 nondiseases 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. Donna Chavez
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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• Product Details
• Table of Contents
• Reviews

• Mass Market Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin (June 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1741145791
• ISBN-13: 978-1741145793
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.6 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces

Selling Sickness: How Drug Companies are Turning Us All into Patients Mass Market PDF

After oil production peaks, higher energy prices are likely to sink the world economy into a never-ending depression, so it will be important to stay healthy, because everything, and especially medical costs, are likely to be more expensive in the future. Before you incur high medical costs you can little afford, make sure you're even ill first. A great deal of fat could be cut out of the health care system right now and used instead to help people who are truly ill.

Getting healthy people to buy drugs they don't need, which won't cure what they don't have, and potentially have unpleasant to dire side effects, sounds like such a crazy premise, even Hollywood wouldn't buy it.

Yet that's just what's happened, as Moynihan and Cassels document in their book "Selling Sickness". The 500 billion dollar pharmaceutical industry has plenty of money to spend convincing us that our ordinary travails mask mental illnesses, and common aches and pains need treatment.

Americans represent five percent of the world's population, but we consume fifty percent of prescription drugs.

Millions of healthy people have asked their doctor about that purple pill they saw on television, or been given drugs pushed by the army of 80,000 drug salesmen who've influenced your doctor with free lunches and far more.

Many people now take drugs that may have harmful side effects and won't make much of a difference in improving their health. Hormone replacement therapy turned out to increase the chance of heart attacks for women, one of the blockbuster cholesterol lowering drugs was withdrawn from the market because it was implicated in causing deaths.

The FDA isn't looking out for you either, as shown in the chapter on irritable bowel syndrome.

The marketing strategies of the world's biggest drug companies now aggressively target the healthy and the well. Common complaints have been transferred into frightening conditions and more and more ordinary people turned into patients. The drug companies have found that there's a lot of money to be made telling healthy people they're sick. With less than 5% of the world's population, the U.S. makes up over 50% of the world market for prescription drugs. Ironically, these much-hyped medicines sometimes cause more harm than good; another problem is that drug companies encourage over-reliance on drugs - instead of smoking cessation and exercise.

After this introduction, "Selling Sickness" goes on to cover examples in cholesterol, depression, high blood pressure, etc. Cholesterol, for example, has become a $25 billion, rapidly-expanding industry, even though cholesterol is only one of several factors affecting health, and for many, not a factor at all. As with many other conditions, the definition of what constitutes "high cholesterol" is regularly revised. In the latest instance (2004), eight of the nine experts on the panel also served as paid speakers, consultants, or researchers to the world's major drug companies. In most cases the experts had ties to at least four of the companies.

It is estimated that almost 90% of those writing guidelines have conflicts of interest because of financial ties to the industry. Close to half the billion/year funding for medical education comes from drug companies. About 300,000 meetings, events, and conferences are sponsored by the industry each year, often hosted by societies like the American Heart Association, partly funded by the drug companies as well. These entangled relationships are often not revealed.