User:Bluerasberry/selling sickness movement

Selling Sickness is the name of a social movement which raises awareness of unnecessary health care and coordinates education about correct use of medicine.

The term "selling sickness" is not the name of any particular organization, but rather a term used by various grassroots patient advocates to describe a problem.

Goals of movement
The Selling Sickness campaign seeks to address the tendency of "well meaning doctors, patients, politicians, and journalists (to) consistently overestimate the benefits and underestimate the harms of most medical treatments." Proposed solutions to the problem have included calls for increased regulation of the medical science, academic journal publishing reform to increase transparency, greater patient engagement in shared decision making, and expecting health care professionals to strive for higher standards in their own practice.

Direct-to-consumer advertising is a concern of selling sickness advocates.

Disease mongering is a concern of selling sickness advocates.

Participants
Ray Moynihan wrote Selling Sickness and advocates generally on issues related to the movement.

Kim Witczak is a patient advocate who has sought to raise awareness about antidepressants and suicide risk since her husband experienced extreme side effects from antidepressant use and died of suicide in 2003. She later became a coordinator for the Selling Sickness conference and movement in general.

Leonore Tiefer of the New York University School of Medicine is a co-coordinator with Witczak of the Selling Sickness conference.

Patient advocate Rosemary Gibson has said that the problems in the health industry are exacerbated by financial pressures relating to medical companies being "too big to fail" and having financial conflicts which prevent their shortcomings from being addressed.