Manufacturing Illness

This is an important book brought to my attention from the Alliance of Human Research Protection. It confirms previous posts to this blog on manufactured illness, supported by the American Psychiatric Association's publication "A Research Agenda for DSM V" . The following is from the AHRP:

Selling Sickness: How the World’s Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients, by Ray Moynihan, an international health journalist, and Alan Cassels, a pharmaceutical policy researcher, is likely to become a best seller because it is compelling, highly readable, and health care budgets are being bankrupted by this industry.

By examining 10 disastrous drug-related cases that have jolted public trust in medicine and hugely tarnished the luster of a once admired industry, the authors lay bare this industry's ingenious marketing strategy.

That strategy has succeeded in hugely increasing demand for drugs--mostly by healthy Americans. The book’s prologue contains the germ that sprang into action validating the authors’ premise: that the pharmaceutical industry (Pharma) is no longer focused on selling cures for disease, but rather on marketing drugs to the worried well. The authors recount the candid comments made by the retiring CEO of Merck:

“Thirty years ago…Merck’s aggressive chief executive Henry Gadsden told Fortune magazine of his distress that the company’s potential markets had been limited to sick people. Suggesting he’d rather Merck to be more like chewing gum maker Wrigleys, Gadsden said it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. Because then, Merck would be able to “sell to everyone.” Three decades on, the late Henry Gadsden’s dream has come true.”

Moynihan and Cassels show how Pharma has used “weapons of mass seduction” to gain public trust and decisive influence over the medical profession, medical practice guidelines, public health policies, and both scientific journals and mass media. It succeeded in gaining control over medical practice and public expenditure through strategic, systematic, and systemic corporate sponsorship. Indeed, this industry has succeeded in shaping our very perceptions of health and sickness to promote “lifestyle” medicines.

Pharma seems to have adopted the marketing strategy of the cosmetic industry, and is creating discontent and anxiety about perceived imperfections; using psychological weapons to prey on people’s fear of sickness, aging, loneliness, death—all calculated to create a demand for its latest pill. This immoral sales strategy disregards the fact that--unlike moisturizers, rouge, and perfume—drugs have risks and adverse side effects that are often catastrophic.

To overcome this problem, industry has turned medicine on its head. Instead of relying on evidence for the presence of a disease, and evidence of a favorable risk/ benefit ratio to justify a medical intervention, doctors are prescribing drugs based on corporate sponsored “public awareness” campaigns that create “illness.”

“[Public] awareness campaigns are turning the worried well into the worried sick. Mild problems are painted as serious disease, so shyness becomes a sign of social anxiety disorder and premenstrual tension a mental illness called premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Everyday sexual difficulties are seen as sexual dysfunctions, the natural change of life is a disease of hormone deficiency called menopause, and distracted office workers now have adult ADD. Just being ‘at risk’ of an illness has become a ‘disease’ in its own right, so healthy middle aged women now have a silent bone disease called osteoporosis, and fit middle-aged men a lifelong condition called high cholesterol.”

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