The invention of a whole range of diseases including penis-size anxiety and internet addiction is turning us all into patients. Jörg Blech investigates how inventing disease is fast becoming a profitable business and unearths the real motives of those pulling the strings.

This is a highly accessible and reassuring account of how the pharmaceutical industry is redefining health, making it a state that is almost impossible to achieve. Many normal life processes - states as natural as birth, ageing, sexuality, unhappiness and death - are systematically being reinterpreted as pathological so creating new markets for their treatments. In this enlightening book, Jörg Blech reveals: how the invention of diseases by pharmaceutical companies is turning us all into patients, and how we can protect ourselves against this how the medical profession has been bullied and co-opted into endorsing profitable cures for people who aren't ill fears about how pharmaceutical companies create markets by playing on the general public's concern with their health. A self-help book in the truest sense, Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills reassures us about our own health. It is essential reading for doctors, nurses and patients alike.

'Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills is a timely and robust challenge to the medicalisation of life and the transformation of health into disease.' - Michael Fitzpatrick, Barton House Health Centre