"Selling Sickness" by Alan and Ray

Over three decades ago the maverick thinker Ivan Illich warned that an expanding medical establishment was medicalising life itself, undermining the human capacity to cope with the reality of suffering and death, and making too many well people into patients. A decade ago medical writer Lynn Payer described the process she called disease-mongering, in which doctors and drug companies unnecessarily widened the boundaries of illness to recruit more patients and sell more drugs. Her writings have become ever more relevant as the industry's marketing roar becomes louder and its grip on the health care system much stronger.

The global drug giants are no longer content with selling medicines only to the ill. As Wall Street knows well, there is a lot of money to be made telling healthy people that they're sick.

There are many different promotional strategies in the selling of sickness, but the common factor among them all is the marketing of fear.

The much-hyped medicines sometimes cause the harm they are supposed to prevent. Long-term hormone replacement therapy seemed to increase the risk of heart attacks for women, while antidepressants appear to increase the risk of suicide among the young. At least one blockbuster cholesterol-lowering drug has been withdrawn from the market because it was implicated in deaths. A drug sold as a treatment for common bowel disorders led to constipation so severe that some of its users died; in this case the official government regulators were more interested in protecting drug company profits than the public's health.

-- Excerpt from Selling Sickness written by Alan cassels and Ray Moynihan

Alan Cassels is a pharmaceutical policy researcher at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. Ray Moynihan is a journalist specialising in health issues in the ‘British Medical Journal’ It's worth sharing.