Sex, Lies & Pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceutical company marketing is merging with medical science, helping to turn the ordinary ups and downs of life into the symptoms of diseases and disorders.

By widening the boundaries of illness and lowering the threshold for treatments, millions of new patients are created, resulting in billions of new profits. Ordinary life becomes increasingly medicalized and the industry strategy becomes one of ‘selling sickness’.
Currently some doctors are claiming 43 percent of women suffer with a condition called ‘female sexual dysfunction’, and drug companies argue one-in-ten women have ‘hypoactive sexual desire disorder’, a condition critics say does not even exist as it is currently described. Ray Moynihan will reveal how drug companies no longer simply sponsor the scientific activities – the prevalence surveys, the measurement tools, and the diagnostic instruments – in some cases corporate employees are actually helping to construct these basic building blocks of a new medical condition. His revelations are both fascinating and frightening.

Ray Moynihan is an award-winning investigative journalist with an international reputation. He writes regularly for the British Medical Journal and is a conjoint lecturer at the University of Newcastle, in Australia. His book Selling Sickness has been translated into 12 languages. His new book, Sex, Lies & Pharmaceuticals is being released globally late 2010.