Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77600 in Books
• Published on: 2006-06-22
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

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
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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

Review
"Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels examine how the drug industry has transformed the way we think about physical and mental health and turned more and more of us each year into customers."

Customer Reviews

Peak oil and Health -- you might not even be ill
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 FDA let the drug Lotronex remain far too long on the market, despite evidence coming in from doctors that it was killing, hospitalizing, and causing complications never seen before by doctors treating this syndrome.

How has the pharmaceutical industry pulled this off?

1) The point where you "need" to take a particular drug is continually lowered (i.e. for cholesterol, high blood pressure, etc), often far lower than necessary. Many of the doctors setting these lower standards have financial ties to the drug companies, so when more drugs are sold to more people, they stand to profit. Every time the good cholesterol level is lowered, millions of new customers are created overnight.

2) New diseases are invented that don't really exist. Menopause, for example, is a natural part of the life cycle. It's doubtful that attention deficit disorder and other "diseases" in the book exist.

3) Pharmaceutical companies exaggerate the good the drug will do for you. Brittle bones are only 13% of the problem in osteoporosis, which tends to affect people the last chapter of their life. Far more important is: don't fall! Be sure you've got good eyeglasses; your rugs won't slip, exercise, and so on.

4) You'll never see ads telling you the one thing you need to know: if you want to lead a healthy life, eat a good diet and exercise. But you will see all sorts of deceptive ads, which this book does a good job of describing. You'll be angry and sometimes shocked when you see the dirty tricks used to promote drugs.

There are people who stand to benefit from these drugs, the book is definitely not saying they're totally useless, and in fact, many of the people who do need these drugs aren't getting them.

But before you decide to take a drug, be sure to do research first to make sure you really need it. If you have one of the following, or know someone who does, you might want to read this book, which discusses depression, high cholesterol, menopause, attention deficit disorder, high blood pressure, premenstrual dysphoric disorder, social anxiety disorder, osteoporosis, irritable bowel syndrome, and female sexual dysfunction. The final chapter is entitled "What can we do?"

[...]

Big Pharma Mashed Again
An excellent exposé of 10 or more examples of manufactured or exaggerated illness, from adult attention deficit disorder to osteoporosis. Overblown promotions of drugs and concealment of drug side-effects well explained. Big Pharma's use of public relations firms to create fear of some more or less normal condition is shown. Big Pharma's capture of the FDA and other agencies is shown.

Big Pharma's secret ownership of some patient support groups is shown, as is its control of much Continuing Medical Education. Its lobbying is legendary.

Even if you know about this disgrace in the USA, there are many aspects that may be new to you, so read this book.
Easy to read, good referencing, decent index.

Weak technically, but this might have been a desire not to stress the reader. Still, authors seem unaware that older people with the highest cholesterol and LDL levels live the longest (Schupf N, Costa R, Luchsinger J, et al. (2005). Relationship Between Plasma Lipids and All-Cause Mortality in Nondemented Elderly. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 53:219-226.), or that blood pressure rises naturally with age, and only the top 10% of BP levels can be treated with any benefit.

Television Drug Advertising
It's the Great American Way, gone a little bit crazy. There have always been beople who will tell you that by using their product your life would be better. And now television has come about so they can tell millions of people at once. In this case the product being sold is drugs. But what people are buying is peace of mind. It may be that that new car will help you get the girl, or maybe it's Viagra.

The ones I particularly like are those commercials that can't quite describe what the illness is, but taking this drug will fix it. And I also like the bit in all of them where they have to tell about things like side effects. Strangely enough this bit seems to be spoken very fast. My favorite one here is if you get an erection that lasts more than four hours seek medical help. ==While the authors make a good case that the drug companies are treating non-existing illnesses, is it any real difference from telling us that brand name pain killers are better than those bottles labeled aspirin, acetaminophen or ibuprofen.

I think the book is quite right, the drug companies want to sell us more drugs. And they will find people willing to pay for them. I enjoyed reading the book, it details how the drug companies have created a world where the US with 5% of the population buys 50% of the drugs sold. And our longevity rates are not at the top of the lists.