Selling health not as profitable as selling sickness

Had a great vacation in San Francisco and then to Big Sur. That was when I decided I wanted to get into the blogging realm. While in SF we went to our favorite bookstore in the mission area called Modern Times along with many trips to Pakwan, a really great Indian/Pakistani restaurant. We took down tons of titles as we were not able to buy all the ones we saw of interest. One book they had was called "Selling Sickness." Since getting back to town I went and checked it out at the library. Here is the opening point in the prologue -- "...Merck's aggressive chief executive Henry Gadsden told Fortune magazine of his distress that the company's potential markets had been limited to sick people...it had long been his dream to make drugs for healthy people. Because then Merck would be able to "sell to everyone.""

What a dream! Obviously more money can be made if you can make drugs for everyone. So the book goes into lots of areas where "illnesses" have been created to justify new production of drugs. Worth a read if only for the stuff in there about cholesterol. They keep lowering the bar on what the acceptable level of total cholesterol such that it can be reached by most people only if you take statin drugs. One of the biggest blockbuster drugs ever is Lipitor.

The whole deal about cholesterol is a big controversy. Maybe my next post will give some alternative thoughts on that subject that I have come across in recent years. Here is an interesting factoid. The brain has tons of cholesterol. It is like a fat sponge. What are the implications of having drugs that short circuit the body's ability to produce it's own cholesterol? Ironically, one of the claims of the statin producers is that they may be good for preventing Alzheimer's Disease. I wonder if in the end we might find out that they contribute to it instead.