Selling Sickness

by Moynihan, Ray; Cassels, Alan

• ISBN13: 9781560256977
• ISBN10: 1560256974
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-06-23
• Publisher: Nation Books

Summary

Thirty years ago, the head of the drug company Merck made some remarkably candid comments about his distress that his company's market was limited to sick people. Suggesting he would like Merck to be more like the maker of Wrigley's chewing gum, the CEO said it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people, to "sell to everyone." That dream now drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on earth. From award-winning Ray Moynihan,one of the world's top medical journalistsSelling 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. This in turn is driving up personal drug bills and threatening to bankrupt national health systems all over the world. As more and more ordinary life is "medicalized," the industry moves ever closer to being able to "sell to everyone."

Author Biography

Alan Cassels is a pharmaceutical policy researcher at the University of Victoria, British Columbia.

Table of Contents

Prologue: Selling sickness	ix
1. Selling to everyone High cholesterol	1	(21)
2. Doughnuts for the doctors Depression	22	(19)
3. Working with celebrities Menopause	41	(20)
4. Partnering with patients Attention deficit disorder	61	(21)
5. Making risks into medical conditions High blood pressure	82	(17)
6. Advertising disease Premenstrual dysphoric disorder	99	(20)
7. Shaping public perceptions Social anxiety disorder	119	(20)
8. Testing the markets Osteoporosis	139	(17)
9. Taming the watchdogs Irritable bowel syndrome	156	(19)
10. Subverting the selling Female sexual dysfunction	175	(21)
Epilogue: What can we do?	196	(5)
Notes	201	(41)
Acknowledgments	242	(5)
Index	247