Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills: Pharmaceutical Companies and the Medicalisation of Normal Life

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.