hireRx | 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
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Publisher: Nation Books (6/22/2006) ISBN: 156025856X Edition: 1 Paperback: 272 pages Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.8 inches Average Customer Review: based on 26 reviews.
Thirty years ago, Henry Gadsden, the head of Merck, one of the world's largest drug companies, told Fortune magazine that he wanted Merck to be more like chewing gum maker Wrigley's. It had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people so that Merck could "sell to everyone." Gadsden's dream now drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on earth. Drug companies are systematically working to widen the very boundaries that define illness, and the markets for medication grow ever larger. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness and common complaints are labeled as medical conditions requiring drug treatments. Runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder, and hyperactive children have ADD. When it comes to conditions like high cholesterol or low bone density, being "at risk" is sold as a disease. Selling 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, in turn threatening to bankrupt health-care systems all over the world. As more and more of ordinary life becomes medicalized, the industry moves ever closer to Gadsden's dream: "selling to everyone."

Customer Reviews
the pharmascams accelerate Books like this could save your life and the lives of your loved ones, and can certainly help to avoid much unnecessary pain and damage. There's valuable information here, from an excellent investigative journalist. Everyone should know about this book, as well as similarly worthwhile books like The Truth about the Drug Companies, Dirty Medicine, Racketeering In Medicine, The Great Cholesterol Con, Heart Frauds, How to Protect Your Heart from Your Doctor, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (amusingly written, by a medical doctor, as well as scandalous), The Medical Mafia (also by a medic, similar theme as Confessions and passionately but badly written), Cancer: Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth, The Cancer Industry, Cancer is Not a Disease, Why We will Never Win the War on AIDS and the many books against vaccination, the biggest scam that is maiming and killing the coming generations.

Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel Exposed Selling Sickness is a striking and bare-knuckled expose' about how the multibillion dollar Pharmaceutical Drug Cartel (PDC) exercises arbitrary and Fifth Column influence over the FDA, the NIMH and premiere medical and psychiatric journals and organizations, while shaping the perceptions of the lemming masses. Promoters and agents of the multibillion dollar advertising industry hold the rank of Joseph Goebbels in the PDC, using funding for fifth column advertising, research projects and "education" grants to control journals, public agencies and artificial "grassroots" movements, (i.e. "Astroturf.") While this phenomena demonstrates that corporate and stockholder interests are not always in the best public interest, it also begs a larger question: Can the masses be drugged (as opposed to crushed by military force) into surrendering independent liberty to the Brave New World of a Marxist/Von Mises hybrid similar to that of China?

Must read before popping another pill. A must-read for everyone who is on prescription medications or has a loved one on meds. Especially, if you think the FDA protects consumers.

A must read This is an excellent and well written book. If you want to be informed, I suggest you read it. I won't bother restating what others have said. I also notice that physicians here rating the book don't like it as much. I wonder why?

Flim Flam Code words, "Disease," "Clinically Proven," and "Blind Study." These are the catch words, we hear in the brain washing TV commericals, we are bombarded with each and every time we sit down in front of the "Boob Tube." All this and so much more are here within these pages. Statins, cholesterol lowering drugs, which create more problems than they solve, with the very likihood of liver disfunction, happens to be the best sellers right now, even though diet adjustment, and exercise are less risky, far cheaper, and more effective. Oh and beware the numbers, as to what is high cholesterol or low, have been changed to suit "Big Pharma." Those who sit on the panel at the FDA, have finanical ties to "Big Pharma," and ignore the damages left behind by taking simple disorders like constipation, declairing constipation a disease. Because the FDA has declaired only a drug, can cure a disease. Next prescribing a drug via your doctor, who is likely getting some type of a kick back of one kind or another, from "Big Pharma." A drug instead of recommending more fibre in the diet, more water, and exercise. Because of the FDA mandate, it is illegal for such a recommendation to be issued. Let us not forget that members of our dollar chasing Congress, and Senate go on to become advisors, or lobbyists for "Big Pharma," and try to tell us there is no conflict here. Even though to keep "Big Pharma" afloat billions are spent on Congress, the Senate, and marketing. I wonder if that is why the "Junk" is so expensive? Of course more people die from prescription drugs, than die from illegal street drugs. Yes look it up. This book should open the eyes of us all if just to make us read, and research more. Because too many of us hear about this disease and that on the boob tube, and then ask their doctor for this new "Magic Bullet." Some will dismiss this book as "Alarmist" rantings, and that there is really nothing to be concerned about. Some will laugh, others will ask their doctor's many more questions. Whatever, get the book and try to get pass the soft music, or flashy graphics from Park Avenue, and understand, it is all about money. "Big Pharma" money that is.