Alan Cassels has been immersed in pharmaceutical policy research and healthcare journalism for 25 years, mostly researching and writing about how prescription drugs are regulated, marketed, prescribed and used.
The main focus of Cassels’ writing is the reality of ordinary people who are often facing the sharp end of the pharmaceutical marketing machine which is increasingly selling us tests, treatments and theories of disease that turn more and more of us into patients.
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.
He believes that humans need clean, clear health information as urgently as they need clean water. His recent book, The Cochrane Collaboration: Medicine’s Best Kept Secret (published in 2015) weighs into the history of an international organization which produces high quality medical information.
In 2018 Alan Cassels joined UBC’s Therapeutics Initiative as their Communications Director, producing therapeutics letters and other pharmaceutical-related education for doctors and pharmacists.