Description
Book SynopsisThe number of prescriptions issued by family doctors has soared threefold in just fifteen years with millions now committed to taking a cocktail of half a dozen (or more) different pills to lower the blood pressure and sugar levels, statins, bone strengthening and cardio protective drugs. In Too Many Pills, doctor and writer James Le Fanu examines how this progressive medicalisation of people''s lives now poses a major threat to their health and wellbeing, responsible for a hidden epidemic of drug induced illness (muscular aches and pains, lethargy, insomnia, impaired memory and general decrepitude), a sharp increase in the number of emergency hospital admissions for serious side effects and implicated in the recently noted decline in life expectancy.
The paradoxically harmful, if increasingly well recognised, consequences of too much medicine are illustrated by the remarkable personal testimony of the readers of James Le Fanu''s weekly medical column, coerced into tak
Trade Review
James Le Fanu meticulously dissects the science, spin and unethical practices -- Gavin Francis * The Times *
This is a profoundly disturbing book . . . written with a passionate clarity that illuminates the most complex matters -- Bryan Appleyard * Sunday Times *
James Le Fanu is our most incisive medical journalist, and in his excellent new book he turns his attention to the dangerous and expensive phenomenon of over-prescribing . . . Too Many Pills is above praise for its clarity, its elegance of argumentation, its humanity and its uncommon common sense * Literary Review *
Le Fanu writes with great clarity. He makes complex synthesised data available and clear to the non-specialist, without ever dumbing down * Telegraph *
