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Selling Sickness
Selling Sickness: How the World’s Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients Selling Sickness
Selling Sickness: How the World’s Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients, by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, 241 pp, $26, ISBN 1-56025-697-4, New York, NY, Nation Books, 2005.
Selling Sickness, directed by Catherine Scott, produced by Pat Fiske, cowritten by Ray Moynihan, videocassette, 52 min, color, $390, rental $75, New York, NY, First Run/Icarus Films, 2004.
JAMA. 2005;294:1114-1116.
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At the American Medical Association meeting in June 2005, six separate resolutions were introduced advocating for limitations or outright bans on direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs.1 Marketing, an important if not critical preoccupation of the major pharmaceutical producers, is no longer aimed just at physicians. Since the 1990s, research has confirmed that drug company–sponsored research funding and gift giving could significantly affect clinical trial outcomes and individual physicians’ prescribing patterns.2-3
Selling Sickness goes one step further, alleging that, in an effort to increase sales, drug manufacturers have begun to repackage medical conditions and advertise them directly to the general public as diseases in need of pharmaceutical treatment. Companies have benefited from the more permissive climate established in 1997 by Food and Drug Administration (FDA) relaxation of drug advertising regulations. As a result, the authors argue, current advertisements provide little realistic information about the marginal benefits of drug treatment for most . . . [Full Text of this Article]
Sue Sun Yom, MD, PhD, Reviewer
M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, Tex
ssyom@mdanderson.org
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