How Overdiagnosis Turns Healthy People Into Patients | Alan Cassels

“We get a lot of inappropriate over-prescribing for almost everything,” says drug policy researcher and journalist Alan Cassels.

Cassels is the co-author of “Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients.”

For Cassels, it was one disease in particular—osteoporosis—that changed his entire view of medicine.

Based on changing definitions of the disease, large swaths of Americans could suddenly be declared sick and in urgent need of drug treatment.

They “medicalized normal aging of basically the entire female population. Overnight,” he says.

In our interview, we discuss the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on overdiagnoses and prescriptions, and how the criteria for many diseases can be expanded arbitrarily.

“When you look closely at the quality of prescribing, a lot of times, the decision-making is not really driven by evidence. It’s driven mostly by … marketing, biases, influence from thought leaders, and influence from guidelines, medical guidelines themselves, which are often appallingly biased,” he says.

Many doctors, Cassels says, know little about the adverse effects of the many drugs they prescribe to their patients.

We also dive into the connection between psychiatric drug prescriptions and violence, how psychiatry labels normal behaviors as abnormal, and how exaggerated statistics are used to sell theories of disease and drug treatments.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.