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Selling Sickness to the Well
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of MSNBC News
Posted: November 11th, 2006
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/8789159/site/newsweek/
A new book looks at how pharmaceutical companies are using aggressive marketing campaigns to turn more people into patients. In their new book, Selling Sickness: How the Worlds Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels examine how the drug industry has transformed the way we think about physical and mental health and turned more and more of us each year into customers. Moynihan...a regular contributor to the British Medical Journal [discusses] how -- and why -- drug makers have begun targeting people who arent sick. The so-called preventives are where the big money are: like the bone-density drugs or the cholesterol [-lowering] drugs. Increasingly were seeing the marketing shift to those types of drugs. People talk about the "worried well." There are many ways in which the drug companies target those people. Theres an informal alliance between the drug companies and aspects of the medical profession and aspects of the patient advocacy world who all seem to have interests in defining more and more people as ill. Americans make up less than 5 percent of the worlds population but the U.S. makes up...half of total spending on drugs.
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