By Alan Cassels

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On Sale: Jun 23, 2006
Page Count: 272 pages
Publisher: Bold Type Books
ISBN-13: 9781560258568

Thirty years ago, the head of the drug company Merck made some remarkably candid comments about his distress that his company’s market was limited to sick people. Suggesting he would like Merck to be more like the maker of Wrigley’s chewing gum, the CEO said it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people, to “sell to everyone.” That dream now drives the marketing machinery of the most profitable industry on earth. From award-winning Ray Moynihan, — one of the world’s top medical journalists — Selling Sickness reveals how widening the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments is creating millions of new patients and billions in new profits. This in turn is driving up personal drug bills and threatening to bankrupt national health systems all over the world. As more and more ordinary life is “medicalized,” the industry moves ever closer to being able to “sell to everyone.”

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Ray Moynihan

About the Author

Ray Moynihan is one of the world’s leading health writers. His work has appeared in the Sydney Morning Herald, the Age, the Australian Financial Review, the British Medical Journal, Lancet, and New England Journal of Medicine.

Alan Cassels is a Canadian researcher and writer who works on drug policy issues.

Learn more about this author