Selling sickness

In her review of Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All into Patients, Miriam Shuchman¹ ignores one of the central premises of the book. The authors, Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels, argue that physicians have been conscripted into a systematic campaign by the pharmaceutical industry to broaden the boundaries of illness so that drugs can be prescribed to formerly healthy people. As they note, “a health system that allows drug companies to play a role in defining who is sick is fundamentally unhealthy.”