ABSTRACT

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.

chapter 1|13 pages

Limitless healing

chapter 2|15 pages

Myths of medicine

chapter 3|13 pages

A disease called diagnosis

chapter 4|13 pages

Risk factor merry-go-round

chapter 5|7 pages

Insanity as the norm

chapter 6|14 pages

Psycho pill with break-time snack

chapter 7|16 pages

The femininity syndrome

chapter 8|12 pages

Old men, new afflictions

chapter 9|10 pages

Whenever you want it

chapter 10|12 pages

Destiny in our genes

chapter 11|13 pages

Healthy beyond belief