Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients

Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients. By Ray Moynihan & Alan Cassels. Vancouver/Toronto: Greystone Books. 2005. 272 pp. ISBN 1553651316.

Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels 's Selling Sickness is a welcome and accessible exposé of profit-driven pharmaceutical companies and their extensive influence in selling sickness to the "healthy well." The authors argue that "the pharmaceutical industry is working behind the scenes to help define and design the latest disorders and dysfunctions in order to create and expand markets for their newest medicines" (p. vii). They contend that this process turns "too much ordinary life into medical illness, in order to expand markets for medications" (p. xix). The authors reveal how so-called sicknesses, ranging from high cholesterol to female sexual dysfunction, are invented and marketed, in order to sell their corresponding medicinal cures.

In aggregate, the ten chapters explore how the pharmaceutical complex makes use of advertisers, celebrity endorsers, patient groups, medical professionals and associations, and even federal regulators, to ensure that their drugs get sold. The strengths of this volume are its journalistic style, accessibility, and breadth.

According to the authors of this study, medical conditions have been routinely broadened so as to increase the number of possible candidates for prescription medications. For instance, the number of depressed persons has been highly inflated with revised definitions of depression; ADD has been increasingly diagnosed in adults; and personality qualities like shyness are now explained as social anxiety disorders. Other illnesses such as high cholesterol are not really illnesses in and of themselves. Rather, as the authors explain, they may be indicators or risk factors for future...