 | |
| Author | Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Subject | Unnecessary health care |
| Publisher | Allen & Unwin (Australia); Nation Books (US) |
Publication date | 2005 |
| Pages | 254 |
| ISBN | 978-1-56025-856-8 |
| OCLC | 60615329 |
Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us All into Patients is a 2005 book by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels about unnecessary health care.
The work discusses disease mongering. [1] A summary in JAMA described the book as follows:
The book is organized as a series of case studies, each focused on a particular drug. Each chapter explores a different aspect of drug marketing, with evidence drawn from published editorials, news reports, academic journals, and, most interestingly, original interviews with physician-spokespersons and pharmaceutical sales experts. [2]
Jennifer Barrett in Newsweek said that book was an examination of how the drug industry changed public perception of health care issues. [3] A review for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives said that the authors used "well-honed investigative skills" to "provide solid evidence for their claims". [4] Another reviewer said that the book was a "spirited journalistic exposure of the methods used by the pharmaceutical industry to expand the market for its products" [5] Cal Montgomery in Ragged Edge said that the book was " pitched for general audiences with no special training". [6] The Consumers Health Forum of Australia review said that the book "presented convincing examples that support the idea that growing numbers of people are unnecessarily taking medicines." [7] Judy Segal suggested in Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing that the book was "a wonderful resource for teaching rhetoric of science"; she generally praised the journalistic approach, but noted that "one might wonder if the authors are sufficiently even-handed in their reporting". [8]
A Selling Sickness documentary was made as a film companion to the book. Of the film, a reviewer said that "although its critical intent is apparent throughout, it provides a complex account." [9]
The British National Formulary (BNF) is a United Kingdom (UK) pharmaceutical reference book that contains a wide spectrum of information and advice on prescribing and pharmacology, along with specific facts and details about many medicines available on the UK National Health Service (NHS). Information within the BNF includes indication(s), contraindications, side effects, doses, legal classification, names and prices of available proprietary and generic formulations, and any other notable points. Though it is a national formulary, it nevertheless also includes entries for some medicines which are not available under the NHS, and must be prescribed and/or purchased privately. A symbol clearly denotes such drugs in their entry.
Prescription drug list prices in the United States continually are among the highest in the world. The high cost of prescription drugs became a major topic of discussion in the 21st century, leading up to the American health care reform debate of 2009, and received renewed attention in 2015. One major reason for high prescription drug prices in the United States relative to other countries is the inability of government-granted monopolies in the American health care sector to use their bargaining power to negotiate lower prices, and the American payer ends up subsidizing the world's R&D spending on drugs.
The pharmaceutical industry is an industry in medicine that discovers, develops, produces, and markets pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients, with the aim to cure and prevent diseases, or alleviate symptoms. Pharmaceutical companies may deal in generic or brand medications and medical devices. They are subject to a variety of laws and regulations that govern the patenting, testing, safety, efficacy using drug testing and marketing of drugs. The global pharmaceuticals market produced treatments worth $1,228.45 billion in 2020 and showed a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 1.8%.
David HealyFRCPsych, a professor of psychiatry at Bangor University in the United Kingdom, is a psychiatrist, psychopharmacologist, scientist and author. His main areas of research are the contribution of antidepressants to suicide, conflict of interest between pharmaceutical companies and academic medicine, and the history of pharmacology. Healy has written more than 150 peer-reviewed articles, 200 other articles, and 20 books, including The Antidepressant Era, The Creation of Psychopharmacology, The Psychopharmacologists Volumes 1–3, Let Them Eat Prozac and Mania: A Short History of Bipolar Disorder.
Many countries have measures in place to limit advertising by pharmaceutical companies.
Medicalization is the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions, and thus become the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment. Medicalization can be driven by new evidence or hypotheses about conditions; by changing social attitudes or economic considerations; or by the development of new medications or treatments.
Ben Michael Goldacre is a British physician, academic and science writer. He is the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford. He is a founder of the AllTrials campaign and OpenTrials to require open science practices in clinical trials.
Disease mongering is a pejorative term for the practice of widening the diagnostic boundaries of illnesses and aggressively promoting their public awareness in order to expand the markets for treatment.
Big Pharma: How the World's Biggest Drug Companies Control Illness is a 2006 book by British journalist Jacky Law. The book examines how major pharmaceutical companies determine which health care problems are publicised and researched.
Direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) refers to the marketing and advertising of pharmaceutical products directly to consumers as patients, as opposed to specifically targeting health professionals. The term is synonymous primarily with the advertising of prescription medicines via mass media platforms—most commonly on television and in magazines, but also via online platforms.
No Free Lunch was a US-based advocacy organization holding that marketing methods employed by drug companies influence the way doctors and other healthcare providers prescribe medications. The group did outreach to convince physicians to refuse to accept gifts, money, or hospitality from pharmaceutical companies because it claims that these gifts create a conflict of interest for providers. The group also advocated for less involvement of drug companies in medical education and practice in a variety of other ways.
Medication costs, also known as drug costs are a common health care cost for many people and health care systems. Prescription costs are the costs to the end consumer. Medication costs are influenced by multiple factors such as patents, stakeholder influence, and marketing expenses. A number of countries including Canada, parts of Europe, and Brazil use external reference pricing as a means to compare drug prices and to determine a base price for a particular medication. Other countries use pharmacoeconomics, which looks at the cost/benefit of a product in terms of quality of life, alternative treatments, and cost reduction or avoidance in other parts of the health care system. Structures like the UK's National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence and to a lesser extent Canada's Common Drug Review evaluate products in this way.
Ray Moynihan is an Australian researcher, health journalist, documentary-maker and author. Employed for many years as an investigative journalist at the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, he has also worked for the Australian Financial Review and is currently a visiting editor at the British Medical Journal and a conjoint lecturer at the University of Newcastle. He was also a correspondent for Radio New Zealand. His stories regularly appear in the BMJ, The Australian, Crikey and the ABC.in Australia. Moynihan is a prolific public speaker.
Bullying in the medical profession is common, particularly of student or trainee physicians. It is thought that this is at least in part an outcome of conservative traditional hierarchical structures and teaching methods in the medical profession which may result in a bullying cycle.
The inverse benefit law states that the ratio of benefits to harms among patients taking new drugs tends to vary inversely with how extensively a drug is marketed. Two Americans, Howard Brody and Donald Light, have defined the inverse benefit law, inspired by Tudor Hart's inverse care law.
Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors and Harm Patients is a book by the British physician and academic Ben Goldacre about the pharmaceutical industry, its relationship with the medical profession, and the extent to which it controls academic research into its own products. It was published in the UK in September 2012 by the Fourth Estate imprint of HarperCollins, and in the United States in February 2013 by Faber and Faber.
The Physician Payments Sunshine Act is a 2010 United States healthcare law to increase transparency of financial relationships between health care providers and pharmaceutical manufacturers.
Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine is a book about unnecessary healthcare.
Motivational deficiency disorder is the name of a fake disease imagined for a health campaign to raise awareness of disease mongering.
Health information on the Internet refers to all health-related information communicated through or available on the Internet.