Selling Sickness

Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels
June 2005     ISBN: 1560256974

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.

Newsweek Q & A with the author

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.