Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients PDF

Rating: (49 reviews) Author: Ray Moynihan ISBN : 9781560258568 New from $8.85 Format: PDF

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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 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. Drug companies are systematically working to widen the very boundaries that define illness, and the markets for medication grow ever larger. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness and common complaints are labeled as medical 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. 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."

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• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Nation Books; 1 edition (June 23, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156025856X
• ISBN-13: 978-1560258568
• Product Dimensions: 0.7 x 5.3 x 8.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 7.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)

Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients 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.