A pill for every ill. It’s the sort of jingle that a pharmaceutical marketer would love to see on the Billboard charts and is certainly the mindset of most pharma executives and shareholders, according to the authors of Selling Sickness. But the real insidiousness is the inventing of new illnesses or medicalizing otherwise natural processes such as menopause in the relentless search for new revenue streams – an ill for every pill.

This is a timely book on a hot topic. After all, we don’t get indigestion anymore, we get acid reflux disease. Your shy co-worker may not be shy, but possibly suffering from a psychiatric disorder, and governments across the country are under pressure to pay for costly drug regimens or test for new ailments in search of a drug.

Ordinary people have a gut feeling – one that, given time, will surely be treatable with a pill – that they are being duped by greedy Big Pharma. With huge drug recalls a semi-regular occurrence, people appear to have good reason for concern. Yet drug companies, say the authors, argue that millions of people are going untreated, quietly suffering from a variety of ills, some of which they may never have heard of (or the corporations haven’t invented yet).

The authors dedicate a chapter each to the marketing and “awareness-raising campaigns” of 10 conditions, including high cholesterol, depression, menopause, attention deficit disorder, and female sexual dysfunction, and arrive at a sobering conclusion: “facts are relatively unimportant: what is important are the marketing messages that infuse multi-layered promotional campaigns involving company-sponsored medical foundations, celebrities, thought-leaders and consumer groups.”

The book is a little one-sided by default, since the drug companies declined to be interviewed, but the authors take pains to say that they endorse drugs that help people. What they argue against are the sophisticated, subtle, and occasionally downright deceptive means by which massive drug companies and their foot soldiers in public relations agencies lower the threshold for sickness, frame the public debate on disease, buy off researchers and regulatory bodies, manipulate statistics, overstate minor benefits, and even set up grassroots patient-interest groups to lobby governments and supply interviewees to a mostly unquestioning media.

The corporate creation of disease, sometimes referred to as disease-mongering, appears to be here to stay. The cures, say the authors, are healthy skepticism, pointed questions, a little research, and lifestyle changes that might do more to ease ailments than pills.