Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills

This is a highly accessible and reassuring account of how the pharmaceutical industry is redefining health, making it a state that is almost impossible to achieve. Many normal life processes - states as natural as birth, ageing, sexuality, unhappiness and death - are systematically being reinterpreted as pathological so creating new markets for their treatments. In this enlightening book, Jorg Blech reveals: how the invention of diseases by pharmaceutical companies is turning us all into patients, and how we can protect ourselves against this; how the medical profession has been bullied and co-opted into endorsing profitable cures for people who aren't ill; and, fears about how pharmaceutical companies create markets by playing on the general public's concern with their health. A self-help book in the truest sense, "Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills" reassures us about our own health. It is essential reading for doctors, nurses and patients alike.