Selling sickness

Selling Sickness reveals how the pharmaceutical industry collaborates with doctors, patient groups, and advertisers to redefine ordinary conditions like high cholesterol, mild depression, and erectile dysfunction as serious diseases requiring medication.

The authors document tactics such as sponsoring disease definitions, manipulating statistics, creating fake grassroots campaigns, and influencing medical guidelines to boost drug sales.

They argue this process medicalizes normal life, leading to unnecessary treatments, side effects, and economic waste while prioritizing profits over genuine health needs.