Alan Cassels

Drug Policy Researcher and Author

Alan Cassels believes that humans need clean, clear health information as urgently as they need clean water. He has spent 32 years immersed in pharmaceutical policy research and healthcare journalism, mostly researching and writing about how prescription drugs are regulated, marketed, prescribed, and used. He has a bachelor’s degree in English literature from the Royal Military College of Canada and a master’s degree in public administration specializing in pharmaceutical policy. His niche is in examining the gaps between the marketing and the science around prescription drugs and medical screening, frequently exposing the many forces of disease creation. His books include Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us All into Patients (co-written with Ray Moynihan), The ABCs of Disease Mongering: An Epidemic in 26 Letters, and Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease.

In his writings Cassels focuses on the needs of the end-user, ordinary people facing the sharp end of the medical industry’s marketing machine which is increasingly selling us tests, treatments and theories of disease that threaten to turn more and more of us into patients.

He currently works as an independent researcher and writer, is a Fellow of the Brownstone Institute (www.brownstone.org), and consults for the Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopaedics (www.ficebo.com) based in Helsinki. He is a board member of the Inner Compass Initiative and the Canadian Health Alliance.

Victoria BC. Canada.
cassels@uvic.ca
Tel: 250 508 8996.
Twitter/X: @akecassels
Substack: fifthdoctor.substack.com