Boardroom to bedroom

Saturday, 11th September 2010

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies are Bankrolling the Next Big Condition for Women
by Ray Moynihan
Allen & Unwin, $27.99
pp. 228, ISBN 9781742370187

Innsbruck, Austria, was an unexpected venue for the one-day North-South Dialogue Conference held in the European summer of 1995. It was a conference with a previously undisclosed and unexpected focus for the 30 or so medical specialists who were convened from around the world. Most were complete strangers and hardly any had previously met their host, a professor of biochemical pharmacology at the University of Innsbruck. No one knew why they had been summoned.

Each participant soon realised, however, that the focus of the conference, as it emerged over several seemingly unrelated scientific presentations, was the exposure of subtle scientific distortions that were resulting from an excessively cosy relationship, especially in Europe and the US, between major pharmaceutical companies and the medical profession. Ghost-writing and other techniques were already casting doubt on the objectivity and integrity of the world of medical research.

In medicine, the word ethical can refer either to a proper style of professional conduct or to a drug which can only be sold on a doctor’s prescription. Both senses of this word come fully into play in Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals, a most entertaining piece of non-fiction by Australian journalist Ray Moynihan, ably assisted in one chapter by associate professor Barbara Mintzes of the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.

If you liked Barbarians at the Gate by Bryan Burrough and John Helyar in 1990, you are likely to think that it has been worth waiting 20 years to now read Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals. For here is another enthralling exposé of how hard big business will work for its owners.

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