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, Jörg 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 - 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.

Jorg Blech studied biology and biochemistry at the University of Cologne, Germany and the University of Sussex, UK. He was then trained as a journalist and was awarded internships in Paris, Washington DC and Bangkok. He is the science correspondent for the magazine Der Spiegel and lives with his family in Arlington, Massachusetts.

Preface 1. Limitless Healing 2. Myths of Medicine 3. A Disease called Diagnosis 4. The Risk Factor Merry-go-Round 5. Insanity as the Norm 6. Psycho Pill with Break-Time Snack 7. The Femininity Syndrome 8. Old Men, New Afflictions 9. Whenever You Want It 10. Destiny in our Genes 11. Healthy Beyond Belief. Twelve Questions to Diagnose. Invented Diseases and Dubious Treatments. Notes. Internet Addresses. Acknowledgments