"Selling Sickness" - How Pharma-Medical industry Creates Customers

We are told almost daily that preventative actions is the most effective way of maintaining good health.  the problem is, in the pharmacol-medical industry, the definition of prevention has become perverted to mean early detection, not healthy living.  This is most likely the true reason for our run away health care costs in this country.  We focus on fixing problems rather than avoiding the problem in the first place.

In their new book "Selling Sickness:" authors Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, MD examine the tendency of the healthcare industry to ignore lifestyle-based primary prevention, focused on the three pillars of diet, exercise and stress management, and over the past generation, increase emphasis on mass screenings of asymptomatic populations for early signs of disease, and for markers (blood tests, radiologic findings) that might indicate an increased likelihood of disease in the future, thereby finding new customers for their products and services.

As a very interesting read, they explore how the industry creates or refines disorders for which their therapies can be used; how clinical trials are designed to maximumize appearance of benefits of the therapeutics/drugs being tested; direct to consumer disease awareness campaigns and how the FDA approval process relies on self interest research and pharmaceutical industry funding.

If you are truly interested in how the pharmaco-medical industry is using you and your family's health and well-being to line their pockets.

There is a great review of this book that can be found here.