Volume 193 - Issue 11
Creating and marketing illness
Author: Greg Kyle
Med J Aust 2010; 193 (11): 708. || doi: 10.5694/j.1326-5377.2010.tb04112.x
Published online: 6 December 2010
Published online: 6 December 2010
Sex, lies and pharmaceuticals. How drug companies are bankrolling the next big condition for women
. Ray Moynihan. Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2010 (256 pp). ISBN 9781742370187.
SEX SELLS, as does the implication of a good scandal, so the title alone should generate some sales of Australian investigative journalist Ray Moynihan’s latest exposé of Big Pharma’s marketing machine. Building on the success of his earlier work, Selling sickness, Moynihan here teams up with Dr Barbara Mintzes (Assistant Professor in the Department of Anesthesiology, Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia in Canada) to disassemble the story behind “female sexual dysfunction” or FSD.
The story of FSD is traced through an investigative journalist’s eyes, from the revolution in sexual medicine in the late 1980s, through the launch of the now infamous phosphodiesterase type 5 inhibitors, to today. Along the way, with the benefit of hindsight, the authors assemble the jigsaw pieces of pharmaceutical company influences on researchers and clinicians to paint a picture of a series of disorders being created by the very industry which then fortuitously provides the panacea.
Moynihan and Mintzes are no strangers to highlighting the effects of pharmaceutical company promotion and largesse. While it could be argued that this work is part of a sustained attack on the industry, Moynihan takes great care to emphasise the usefulness of pharmaceuticals for some women who have a sexual disorder. The main theme is that these women form a small minority — not 43% or similar figures quoted by proponents of such medical treatment — and that many non-drug therapies are as effective as drugs, if not more so.
Sex, lies and pharmaceuticals is very readable, and its target audience is consumers, not health professionals. Its main aim is to encourage consumers (or patients) to ask questions of their doctors to gain an understanding of the diagnosis with which they are being labelled, and for which they are subsequently treated. It is $30 well spent to see what your patients may be reading and to question “Where did those useful diagnostic tools really come from?”.