The story inspired this BMJ Front Cover

Rather than tinkering with codes of ethics, a new law like the United State’s  Sunshine Act is whats needed. Here you can read the full text of the column

Former pharmaceutical saleswoman, Petra Helesic

At ABC Radio National’s Background Briefing program, listen to Petra Helesic describe how she marketed medicines to Australian doctors for more than a decade, and the debate over the need for more transparency about the secret payments that regularly flow from companies to leading specialists

“I really wanted to do something about the epidemic of overmedication of our elders” says Johanna Trimble, in Ray’s latest column for the British Medical Journal.

You can read Johanna’s compelling story here

As the article explains, “…the grand assumption that helping a person’s numbers will automatically improve their health, is a delusion as dangerous as it is seductive.”

Yale University Professor Harlan Krumholz says we’re all being far too “cavalier” in our reliance on numbers, and evidence-based medicine architect Professor Gordon Guyatt calls for a new approach that focuses on improving people’s health, not their numbers.

You can read the BMJ feature for free here

Dr Godlee’s editorial  ‘Who should define disease?‘ is well worth a read [Reference: BMJ 2011; 342:d2974]

And you can see here the fantasic BMJ cover May 14 2011 which is based on Ray’s latest BMJ article, detailed below

The article contains explosive comments from the psychiatrist who chaired the taskforce which wrote the DSM IV – the globally influential psychiatrists’ manual of diseases – and it explores ways in which fresh new independent panels might be put together.

An interview with Ray about the BMJ feature can be seen here at The Conversation, discussing how doctors with financial ties to drug companies, may have – in their enthusiasm to treat us – classified far too many healthy people as being sick.

And Ray’s short ABC Health Report presentation on the topic can be heard here