Pills in the Bedroom

Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit from Female Sexual Dysfunction is proof that investigative journalism still exists.

In recent decades, the medical establishment has dramatically expanded the definition of disease and dysfunction to include everything from sexual disinterest to obesity, from shyness to “hyperactivity” in children, with laziness now being discussed as “a neuro-developmental dysfunction.” Studies of new medical dysfunctions are repeated rather than reported upon by a mainstream media who does not seem to read beyond press releases in order to announce sensational findings.

Enter Ray Moynihan, a health journalist for the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet. In Sex, Lies and Pharmaceuticals, he and co-author Barbara Mintzes—an assistant professor in the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutics at the University of British Columbia—scan a medical landscape in...