Selling Sickness: How the World’s Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients
Selling Sickness
- Sue Sun Yom, MD, PhD, Reviewer
-
M. D. Anderson Cancer Center
Houston, Tex
ssyom@mdanderson.org
Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text.
- KEYWORDS:
- BOOK REVIEWS (MEYER HS, ED)
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.
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 …
