Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All into Patients - by Ray Moynihan and Alan Cassels - If you live in the U.S., you can’t escape the onslaught of advertisements for drugs and medical services, so you might not be surprised by the statement on the back cover of this book: “The marketing strategies of the world biggest drug companies now aggressively target the healthy and the well. The ups and downs of daily life have become mental disorders, common complaints are tranformed into frightening conditions, and more and more ordinary people are turned into patients.  Read these Amazon reviews of this book. >Other Books >Links From Page xv - Paragraph 2:   "There are many different promotional strategies used in the selling of sickness, but the common factor among them all is the marketing of fear." Page 140 "...When a group of independent Canadian researchers and doctors based at the University of British Columbia examined all of the scientific data about osteoporosis a few years ago, they concluded that the widespread promotion of bone density tests to women was a classic case of "the marketing of fear." Page 141 "...Because osteoporosis essentially has no symptoms, drug companies had had to work hard to convince women to take the condition seriously. The key to selling has been to instill enough fear to drive people into clinics to get tested for the "disease" and then to get them into treatment." page 142 "...Coincidentally, just a year or so before Fosamax's launch a new definition of the condition called osteoporosis had been written by a study group of the World Health Organization. That group decided that "normal" bone density was the bone density of a young woman (a thirty-year-old) - a definition that automatically made the bones of many older women "abnormal."