Selling Sickness:

by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels

A controversial and provocative look at the way pharmaceutical companies are helping to create and market illness.

Using their dominating influence in the world of medical science, drug companies are working to widen the very boundaries that define illness. Mild problems are redefined as serious illness, and common complaints are labeled as medical conditions requiring drug treatments. Runny noses are now allergic rhinitis, PMS has become a psychiatric disorder, and hyperactive children have ADD.

Selling Sickness reveals how expanding the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments is creating millions of new patients and billions in new profits, in turn threatening to bankrupt national healthcare systems all over the world.

About the Authors: Ray Moynihan has been covering the business of health care for almost a decade as an award-winning broadcast journalist and more recently with the British Medical Journal. He is a regular contributor to the New England Journal of Medicine and Lancet and was a Harkness Fellow in health care policy based at Harvard University.

Alan Cassels is a drug policy researcher at the University of Victoria, in British Columbia, Canada. He has spent most the last ten years studying how clinical research about prescription drugs is communicated to policy makers, prescribers, and consumers and has produced several full-length documentaries for CBC Ideas, including “Manufacturing Patients,” which deals with the subject of selling sickness.

Selling Sickness is now available in any major bookstore, or online at www.amazon.co.uk, or from the publishers, below:

UK Editions: Allen & Unwin Tel: +61 2 8425 0167 Fax: +61 2 9966 0065 Email: JuliaL@allenandunwin.com http://www.allenandunwin.com

Canadian Edition: Greystone Books Tel: (604) 254-7191 http://www.greystonebooks.ca