My friend Jackie lent me her book Selling Sickness by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels. The front cover says “How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us all into Patients”
This book is a marketing expose. It shows in plain language understandable by the common smart person how marketing is done by multinational companies.
Now I know pretty much how marketing and PR works since my wife is in that line of work and I have met people in that profession and have attended their award ceremonies. It’s business.
Legally, the pharmaceutical companies are a business existing to make money, as long as what they do is legal. And yes, what they do is legal, but the book blows the whistle on how unethical and how ultimately harmful the business has become.
Today, people’s and doctors’ minds are shaped by these legal behemoths of corporations they have a heartless soul all by themselves and the result is harmful for most people, including the very doctors and employees of those companies themselves.
The book is a must eye opener for the un-initiated. You will never look at an advertisement, a doctor, a hospital or drug store the same way again. The book shows just the tip of the iceberg. It shows you that the popular diseases trumpeted in the prostituted media are trumpeted because it is big business. The common sense you thought was common sense is in fact a result of effective marketing campaigns which earned the pharmaceutical companies big money.
If you are pharmaceutical company stock holders, you will applaud their techniques. If you eventually become victims of their harmful drugs, procedures and doctor mis-education, you will be cursing them.
The book is an eye opener for those still unaware.