Selling Sickness: How the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies are turning us all into patients by R. Moynihan & A. Cassels, Nation Books, 2005, ISBN I-56025-697-4.

A documentary film version is available through Paradigm Pictures.

According to Greek mythology, a girl named Pandora became curious about the contents of a mysterious box; she opened it a crack and out rushed all the diseases now plaguing humanity. Horrified, she slammed the lid shut, trapping Hope at the bottom.  Within the past few years, intrepid researchers have begun to open that box to let out Hope. But, without Truth, Hope is little more than the desperation that inspires buying lottery tickets. Today, the chances of regaining one’s health through most standard medicine are about as good as winning the jackpot. Until all the truth is out about the corruption of medicine, hope has no power.

Top

A landslide of truth is occurring and gaining momentum with increasing mass. The incomplete but representative chronological list given below is like a table of contents of a book on truth in medicine.  Its chapters deal with drug toxicity (Breggin, Moore, Abramson), the regulatory system’s protection of known harmful drugs (Healy, Angell, Goozner, Angell), medical research forced to serve financial interests at the expense of patient safety and survival (Oliveri), the outright lies informing medical education (Kassirer), how the drug designing process involves knowledge of the product’s potential harm (Ellison), and the death toll now being tabulated by mainstream medical research (Dean).  The authors include drug designers, regulators, clinicians and editors of prestigious medical journals.

Top

And now we learn that the pharmaceutical industry has invented entire diseases. Ray Moynihan, a medical journalist from Harvard who writes for the British Medical Journal, and Cassels, a pharmaceutical policy researcher at the University of Victoria, show how high cholesterol, depression, menopause, attention deficit disorder, high blood pressure, premenstrual syndrome, social anxiety disorder, osteoporosis, irritable bowl syndrome, and female sexual dysfunction were magically transformed from symptoms to diseases by large PR firms paid big bucks to invent more -  even as I write this review.

Top

Nobody doubts that these conditions are symptoms attending various illness: a woman undergoing chemotherapy won’t be very sexy. A victim of Multiple Chemical Sensitivity is likely to be depressed most of the time because most bodily systems are not functioning properly. ADHD is easily produced in children, adults and laboratory animals through food allergies, environmental neurotoxins, and deficiencies of essential nutrients. Osteoporosis is a side effect of many toxic drugs, such as all corticosteroids. Social anxiety re-defined as a disease relieves governments of its responsibility to create a just society; irritable bowel syndrome as a disease hides the fact that our processed and pesticide-loaded food is full of synthetic chemicals our enzymes were not designed to deal with. Worst of all, the authors show how making symptoms into diseases has resulted in the creation of the most deadly drugs and led medical research down the garden path into a veritable jungle where the difference between cause and effect is totally obscured. Only a full understanding of causes can lead to cures; the less one knows about causes, the more deadly medicine becomes for the many, and exceedingly lucrative for the few.

Top

Moynihan and Cassels trace the success of this campaign to the carefully designed “marketing of fear” presented through scientific-appearing “markers”.  (As former drug designer Shane Ellison shows, there is no causative relationship between this marker and a heart attack.)  To support belief in such markers, “thought leaders” in the medical profession are bought through research money and promoted to guideline committees.  In 2001 the “healthy” cholesterol levels were lowered to such an absurd level (without a hint of supporting evidence) that thereby another 36 million North Americans were added, since the mid-1990’s, to the potentially (and fictitiously) sick – all now requiring cholesterol-lowering drugs. Almost 90% of those medical researchers and doctors serving on guideline committees are shown to have conflicts of interest: one of them was in the pay of 10 pharmaceutical companies. 

Top

“Astroturfing” is the creation of fake grassroot patient campaigns dreamed up by a PR company and funded by Big Pharma in the tens of millions of dollars to promote  public awareness. The purchase of celebrities who claim benefits on television from various drugs is yet another ploy – unverifiable as to whether they actually suffer from those diseases and take those drugs they get paid to mention.  And when a drug causes the dead body count to rise, Big Pharma fights tooth and nail in the courts against agencies, even in the face of certain defeat, to ensure a few more months of profits.

Top

Hope, inspired by truth comes from some 50,000 young doctors in training who, together with Nobel Laureate Harold Varmus (former chief of the National Institutes of Health), founded a new medical journal PloS Medicine in 2004; it has no pharmaceutical ads, publishes “clean” research only, and urges doctors not to see drug reps and to return all promotional gifts, even pens. Another such journal, Medical Veritas was started by an international group of toxicologists determined to detoxify the environment as well as medical practice. Selling Sickness documents the truth, provides hope and resources for researchers, clinicians and patients. This book going to save a lot of lives.  

Top

P. Breggin , MD , Toxic Psychiatry, St. Martin ’s Press, 1991

J. Carter, MD, Racketeering in Medicine, Hampton Road , 1992

T.J. Moore, MD, Prescription for Disaster, Simon & Schuster, 1998

Thompson, J et al, The Olivieri Report, Lorimer, 2001

J.S. Cohen, MD, Overdose: The Case Against The Drug Companies, Tarcher Putnam, 2001

D. Healy , MD , Let Them Eat Prozac, Lorimer, 2003

J. Abramson, MD, Overdosed America : The Broken Promise of American Medicine, Harper, 2004

M. Angell , MD , The Truth About the Drug Companies, Random, 2004

M. Goozner, The $ 800 Million Pill, University of California Press, 2004

J. P. Kassirer, MD, On The Take: How Medicine’s Complicity With Big Business Can Endanger Your Health, Oxford University Press, 2005

S. Ellison, Health Myths Exposed, Author House 2005

C. Dean , MD , Death by Modern Medicine, Matrix Veritee, 2005

Top