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Alan Cassels believes that humans need clean, clear health information as urgently as they need clean water. He has been immersed in pharmaceutical policy research and healthcare journalism for 30 years, researching and writing about how prescription drugs are regulated, marketed, prescribed and used. His niche is in examining the gaps between the marketing and the science around regulated drugs (including vaccines) and medical screening, often focusing on the forces of disease creation. His books include Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us All into Patients (co-written with Ray Moynihan), The ABCs of Disease Mongering: An Epidemic in 26 Letters, and Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease.
In most of his writings Cassels focuses on the demands of the end-user, ordinary people facing the sharp end of the prescription pad which is increasingly and inappropriately shaped by entities selling us tests, treatments and theories of disease that threaten to turn more and more of us into patients. His most recent book, The Cochrane Collaboration: Medicine’s Best Kept Secret (published in 2015) weighs into the history of an international organization which produces some of the world’s highest quality medical information.
His interests in rational prescribing, drug safety, overdiagnosis and disease-mongering has led to many invitations to lecture on these topics to actuarial science, journalism, law, medicine, nursing, pharmacy, and political science programs in Canada, Australia, France and the United States.
With well-known drug safety advocate Kim Witczak, Alan Cassels is currently working to create a six-part documentary series on the 20th Anniversary of Selling Sickness, revisiting the cradle-to-grave phenomenon of disease mongering which affects us all. |
