Selling Sickness: How the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are turning us all into patients
By Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels

In Selling Sickness, authors Moynihan and Cassels present statistics the drug companies don’t want you to know. And why would they? At 500 billion dollars annually and growing larger every year, the pharmaceutical industry and their marketing strategies masquerading as education have no interest in helping us get well. In fact, according to these Canadian journalists who back their claims of targeted marketing with starling data, they’re overtly marketing fear and helping us to stay ill by enlarging the pool of potential patients.

Pivotal to the huge increase in the prescription drug business is the art of branding a condition by marketing a “disease” as a means to sell a “cure” and the definition of a “target” audience. For example, in 1987 the American Psychiatric Association “broadened” its definition for Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD) and 50% more children received the diagnosis; “the same kids as 1980, a new definition, more declared sick.” The ADD prescription drug Adderol went from sales of 10 million in 1996 to 500 million in 2002. Between 2002 and 2003 the use of ADD drugs by children under age five rose by 50%! These are trends not to be ignored; they are disturbing reflections of even more disturbing social implications.

Exacerbating the situation is the apparent co-dependent relationship between the medical community and their associated journals and the pharmaceutical industry. Dr. David Graham, longtime FDA safety expert turned whistle blower: “The FDA as currently configured is incapable of protecting America. At every level there is money from drug companies lubricating what many believe is an unhealthy flow of influence. The industry’s sponsorship is strategic, systematic and systemic.”

By keeping the public focus on a narrow range of chemical solutions, it also keeps the focus on a narrow range of causes. Wake Forest University Professor Curt Furberg worries that “medicine is becoming too compartmentalized, taking the attention away from seeing the person as a whole.” Too many people with ordinary life experiences are too quickly offered a label and a drug. The “quick-fix” mentality of our modern age has blurred the boundaries between everyday stressors and mental illness. Feel anxious? Here’s a pill. Feel sad? Take this one. Just be careful of which you take together and what the side effects are.

I felt empowered to make better decisions for myself as a result of reading this book. If you can handle a lot of data written in an objective, journalistic fashion, without a lot of fancy prose or overblown righteousness or rhetoric, you’ll find Selling Sickness an informative and sobering read.

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Leadership Books Reviewed: Archives