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Resource review

University of Sydney, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia

Key Words: evidence-based medicine • drug industry • conflict of interest

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Thirty years ago Henry Gadsden, chief executive of Merck, told Fortune magazine he wanted Merck "to be more like chewing gum maker Wrigley’s." Gadsden said it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people, because then Merck would be able to "sell to everyone."

This is the starting point and central thesis of Moynihan and Cassel’s book Selling sickness—that pharmaceutical companies are working to turn us all into patients and generate ever bigger profits for themselves (and ever greater healthcare costs for health care systems). They make a compelling case that big pharma has deliberately used its influence to broaden disease definitions to expand its markets. For example, they report that Glaxo Smith Kline (formerly Smith Kline Beecham) has claimed that social anxiety disorder (SAD) affects 1 in 8 Americans. Other definitions put the prevalence variously at <1% or, in some studies, up to 4%. By . . . [Full text of this article]