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lan Cassels, co-author of the international bestseller Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning Us All Into Patients, returns with outrageous humour and more outrageous facts. In the irrepressible spirit of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies, Cassels offers up a great romp of disorders that go bump in the night and the industry-sponsored drugs that are marketed to make everything better again. While Cassels’ seditious and deliciously illustrated fable is not for the faint of heart, it is meticulously footnoted for use by health policy wonks of all shapes, sizes and chemical compositions. Take one (or two) of these for good humour. Trust us, your health care policy will feel better in the morning. To shed light on his reasons for writing his second book and his choice of format, Cassels employs the mock interview format below.
AC: Well, let’s take the flu, for example. Seeing as this is an ABC book, I use the letter F to describe the situation with “Ferdinand, who fears the flu… ” There is a huge amount of flu-mongering and it’s not only the vaccine manufacturers who want everyone to get their annual flu shot; the public health agencies are using fear of the Spanish Influenza epidemic of 1918 to get everyone to roll up their sleeves for the annual flu shot. It’s
lowering drug every day. In my estimation, cholesterol-mongering has elevated high cholesterol to the status of a disease in and of itself. Cholesterol-lowering drugs are being sold by the gazillions at the same time that the studies behind the drugs show that they are next to useless for most people. Q: Who is behind this, beside the drug manufacturers? AC: The campaign to medicate all of
Question: Didn’t your last book Selling Sickness cover this ground, about the pharmaceutical industry’s push to redefine illnesses and turn more of us into paying customers? Why a new book about disease mongering? Alan Cassels: The absurdities of disease mongering keep getting more absurd. When Selling Sickness was printed in 2005, I could’ve written 20 more chapters on the phenomenon of
really not a very great idea. Q: I shouldn’t get a flu shot? AC: You shouldn’t get any medical treatment unless you know what your risk is to start with and what the benefits and harms might be related to the treatment. You also need to know what would happen if you did nothing. Q: But if I did nothing and didn’t get the shot, I’d get the flu, wouldn’t I? AC: Probably not. In fact, your likelihood of getting the flu if you are otherwise healthy is low. The likelihood that the flu shot would prevent you from catching the flu this winter is also low. Most people don’t know, and the public health agencies don’t go out of their way to explain, that there is no evidence to prove that mass flu campaigns prevent people from being hospitalized for the flu or missing work. I’d get the flu shot if they could show that people who got it missed work less often, but they can’t so I won’t. Q: So why are public health agencies and doctors pushing expensive and unnecessary treatments on people? AC: That’s really the nub of the book – who stands to gain from mongering diseases. Let’s take another example even more bizarre than the flu. With the letter C, we find Carol who is alarmed at her cholesterol. For a number of years, there has been a very strong, well-funded and near ubiquitous campaign to get ordinary people to: a) Feel enough fear to get a cholesterol test; b) Worry that their cholesterol is “high” and they need to lower it to avoid a heart attack and; c) Become convinced to take a cholesterol-
us for high cholesterol is certainly bankrolled by the manufacturers, but it doesn’t stop there. Others, including groups of physicians and cardiologists who define guidelines on when to treat high cholesterol, with the support of the foundations, are doing the really serious cholesterolmongering. The absurdities abound, especially when you hear that 80-yearold people and even children are being captured by the cholesterol mongers and told they need a pill to reduce their high cholesterol. The medical profession, inebriated on the largesse of Big Pharma, is not the whole problem. It’s also that so few doctors and even fewer patients are taking the time to question the Pharma propaganda they are exposed to. Q: Is that what your book will do, show doctors some examples of the disease mongering propaganda they and their patients are being exposed to? AC: I think so. It’d be nice if physicians read this book, but, really, it is intended for patients, sorry, oops, I mean people, to get them thinking about the disease mongering that surrounds us every day. Q: Why did you choose to go with a format like an illustrated children’s book? I mean, The ABCs of Disease Mongering is a serious topic that you seem to be treating with a bit of whimsy. Why? AC: I have a friend down at the Ministry of Health who has worked there for 23 years. When I told him that I was working on a book about disease mongering, he asked me with a straight face, “What’s that?” I reeled. Whoa, I realized I had to make the concept really simple,
drug marketers pumping and promoting our fears about death and disease in order to sell more drugs. Disease mongering is creating a perpetual state of health anxiety, which, in itself, is an increasing health threat. Everywhere we turn the media, advertising and even our doctors are telling us that we are pre-diseased and potentially sick and we need to do something about it. Q: Like what, for example?
