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." Science and medicine writers Moynihan and Cassels conjecture that most Americans believe, based on information gleaned from a deluge of pharmaceutical-company advertisements, that conditions such as hypertension, high cholesterol, menopause, and chronic constipation are bona fide diseases. They quote reputable medical experts, however, who refute such understandings. What's more, they suggest that billions of precious and diminishing health-care dollars are squandered treating those nondiseases of healthy, wealthy Americans and would be better spent treating the legitimately sick poor and fighting the international AIDS epidemic. Quoting former Merck CEO Henry Gadsen--who, in a 1976 Fortune article, confessed that "it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. Because then, Merck would be able to 'sell to everyone'"--they lay the blame for the misdirected billions at the feet of just such pharmaceutical giants as Merck. Finally, they counterpoint glossy pharmaceutical ad campaigns with alternatives that consumers may consider before asking their doctors for prescription drugs they saw touted on TV. Donna Chavez Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved Used Book in Good Condition