How Overdiagnosis Turns Healthy People Into Patients | Alan Cassels

American Thought Leaders · Dec 24, 2025 · 45m

“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…