Sex, lies and a Big Pharma scandal

Byron Bay author Ray Moynihan with latest release Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals.

YOUR’RE the mother of young children, you have a part time job, and a busy social life. You get home tired from a P&C meeting, grab a snack, and settle the kids. Your partner looks at you with loving bedroom eyes and says “Let’s hit the sack.” Nothing could be more appealing – but you’re too tired for sex.

Watch out! Multi-national drug companies are preparing to label you with a disease called Female Sexual Dysfunction, and they’re training up your doctor to diagnose you, and treat you for this condition.

Over the past decade, Byron Bay investigative medical reporter Ray Moynihan has been researching the way drug companies are in the business of creating diseases for which only they can provide the cure.

His latest book “Sex Lies and Pharmaceuticals – how drug companies are bankrolling the next big condition for women” is being launched next week in Lismore and Byron Bay, prior to an international series of launches.

Moynihan is no lightweight. An award-winning health journalist, author, academic researcher and conjoint professor with the University of Newcastle, he’s one of the Northern Rivers-based, internationally active writers who have found their way to this piece of paradise while continuing to operate on the global stage. He’s also charming, humourous, very well informed, and fond of salsa dancing.

“Even though Byron Bay has been my home for the past four years the vast majority of my work is done internationally – writing, teaching, making documentaries,” Moynihan tells me as we sit at the Clarkes Beach café, watching the Pacific Ocean lap gently against the shore on a soft and sunny day.

“It’s a strange life, but there are increasing numbers of people living this kind of life. It’s making me keen to get more involved here where I live, and generate more work close to home.”

When working for ABC-TV’s Four Corners as a researcher and producer in the early ’90s, Moyniham did a story on Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and was shocked by the shoddy science supporting the diagnosis of ADD and the widespread use of amphetamines in children that ensued.

“That sparked my interest,” he recalls.

“A few years later, I was the national science and medicine reporter for The 7.30 Report and started really to get my teeth into the unhealthy and dirty business of medicine. I learnt very quickly just how dirty it can be – and I’m no conspiracy theorist,” he assures me.

Moynihan’s research into Big Pharma’s questionable practices led to getting his articles published in the world’s most respected medical publications: the British Medical Journal, the New England Journal of Medicine, and The Lancet.

In his book Selling Sickness: How drug companies are turning us all into patients, published in 2005, he says pharmaceutical companies are marketing false illnesses to us with alarming success. He is concerned that the relationship between doctors and pharmaceutical companies can be compromised, with doctors being invited to no-cost seminars and conferences in exotic locations, accommodated, luxuriously wined and dined, and given free gifts. How, he asks, would these junkets not affect a doctor’s inclination to prescribe for unwitting patients the drugs being marketed by these generous hosts?

“Selling Sickness was a TV documentary that became a book and started my next era of work,” Moynihan says.

“The standard of healthcare reporting at that time was appalling. I saw stories that were so important I felt they needed further investigation. Now I do some lecturing on how to improve healthcare journalism.

“I turned to writing books because books can drill into a subject better than articles, and researching a book can get you closer to the truth.”

His next book, Ten Questions You Must Ask Your Doctor, cut through the medical research, and untangled the commercial questions, to give us all advice about how to gain control over the medical decisions that affect our lives and those of our families.

“If the education of your doctor is being run by the pharmaceutical corporations, you may be prescribed a drug you don’t need,” he warns.

“Don’t get me wrong; I have no opposition to Western medicine – it can save lives and reduce suffering. But every dollar spent on an unnecessary treatment is a dollar that could have been spent treating or preventing genuine illness.

“Healthcare costs have risen dramatically in the past 10 years or so, and one of the fastest growing areas has been the cost of pharmaceuticals – what’s driving that? Some of the growth is in areas that are just not needed, but have come under the influence of promotions and Big Pharma public relations spin.

An increasing number of doctors is aware of the harmful effects of persuasive pharma marketing, and more individuals are resisting, Moynihan says. “... but a lot of them think they are immune from that process and they are not.

 “They are either being naïve, or disingenuous.”

Citing how in the USA, under Barack Obama’s health reforms, Congress passed the Sunshine Act, demanding that every transaction involving largesse from Big Pharma being offered to doctors, should be revealed, Moynihan opines that all governments should take more interest.

“There are 30,000 drug company-sponsored events a year in Australia, providing promotional opportunities for pharmaceutical companies,” he says, “but we don’t know the names of doctors who participate in them. I believe patients have a right to know.”

He describes Sex Lies and Pharmaceuticals, as ‘the extraordinary story of the making of a disease’. He believes people, and especially women, will find it fascinating to discover how the drug companies are creating the scientific building blocks of a new medical condition.

It was written to coincide with the marketing arm of Big Pharma trying to sell this ‘disorder’ – and the drugs that go with it, as drug companies race to discover the ‘cure’ – a female Viagra, maybe, or a cream that increases blood flow to the genitals, or maybe some sort of device.

“There’s a danger that the marketing of this ‘disorder’ will distort and confuse a more rational debate about our sexuality, with the ordinary ups and downs of our sexuality being purveyed as symptoms,” he says.

“The idea that women’s sexual difficulties can be simplified and treated with a pill is a marketing concept, not an intelligent response.

“Everyone has sexual difficulties at some time in their lives and there’s a danger that what’s described as Female Sexual Dysfunction could be related to problems a woman has with her partner. Her lack of interest may not all be due to her; so to label her, and give her a pill, is not the right answer.”

Ray Moynihan chose Lismore for the world-premiere launch of his book, at the Northern Rivers University Department of Rural Health (NRUDRH) in Uralba Street this afternoon.

Moynihan then has to hightail it to Byron Bay for the 6.30pm event there, at Mary Ryan’s bookshop, where comedian Mandy Nolan will launch the book and no doubt provide a sparklingly comedic view of the topic.