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."
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