Reddit mentions of Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills: Pharmaceutical companies and the medicalisation of normal life

At this point, I kind of want to follow the great researchable info we just learned about from Paul. I have a feeling I can trust Paul's source more than him. Vaccines are seriously one of the greatest creations of mankind saving millions of people from suffering from the vaccinated diseases since their invention, and all the conspiracy theories surrounding them I just can't get behind.

So let's hop over to Der Spiegel. Actually, let's learn more about Der Spiegel first on Wikipedia since I don't know anything about them either, and I found a page for them here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Spiegel

>Der Spiegel (German pronunciation: [deːɐ̯ ˈʃpiːɡl̩], lit. "The Mirror") is a German weekly news magazine published in Hamburg.[1] With a weekly circulation of 840,000 copies, it is the largest such publication in Europe.[2][3][4]

>It was founded in 1947[5] by John Seymour Chaloner, a British army officer, and Rudolf Augstein, a former Wehrmacht radio operator who was recognised in 2000 by the International Press Institute as one of the fifty World Press Freedom Heroes.[6] Spiegel Online, the online sibling of Der Spiegel, was launched in 1994 with an independent editorial staff. Typically, the magazine has a content to advertising ratio of 2:1.

>Der Spiegel is known in German-speaking countries mostly for its investigative journalism. It has played a key role in uncovering many political scandals such as the Spiegel scandal in 1962 and the Flick affair in the 1980s. According to The Economist, Der Spiegel is one of continental Europe's most influential magazines.

Okay. I'm digging this. It seems pretty legit! Let's keep going down the page.

>Criticism

>One of the main criticism of Der Spiegel concerns its use of language. In 1957, writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger published his essay Die Sprache des Spiegels (“The Language of Der Spiegel”), in which he criticised what he called a "pretended objectivity". Wolf Schneider, an eminent journalist and stylist has called Der Spiegel "the biggest mangler of the German language" and used quotations from the magazine as examples of inept German in his style guides. Their criticism was not so much one of linguistic aesthetics as an argument that Der Spiegel "hides and distorts its actual topics and issues by manipulative semantics and rhetoric rather than by reporting and analysing them".

That doesn't sound good, but why trust these Enzensberger and Schneider guys from the 1950s? Should I look more into them?

>In 1957, however, Enzensberger admitted in a written statement that no other contemporary German magazine attained the Spiegel's level of objectivity.

Hmm, nah, I won't bother looking them up. I'll give Der Spiegel the benefit of the doubt.

>Some critics, in particular the media historian Lutz Hachmeister and the Augstein biographer and former Der Spiegel author Otto Köhler, have brought charges against the magazine's dealings with former Nazis, even SS officers. Allegedly, Der Spiegel, which at other times showed no restraint when exposing the Nazi past of public figures, distorted history and covered up for criminals after enlisting insiders hired to write about Third Reich topics.[citation needed] Its early reports and serials about the Reichstag fire, written by former SS officers Paul Carell (who had also served as chief press spokesman for Nazi Germany's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop) and Fritz Tobias, have since been considered influential in historiography because since the 1960s the Spiegel reports written by these two authors have been corroborated by authoritative historian Hans Mommsen.

Well, that doesn't sound too great, but it's still only alleged and no citation was provided. So let's move on.

>2018 fabrication scandal

Wait, WHAT? Okay, let's not get ahead of ourselves. Our Der Spiegel article was published in 2012, and the supposed interview was held seven months before his death which would place it in February 2009 since he died in September 2009.

I just realized the Internet was alive and well in 2009. I wonder if his last interview was video taped or published somewhere.

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SIDE TANGENT TIME

Let's check YouTube first since it was alive and being used in 2009. Ideally we'd hear the words coming directly from his mouth. https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22leon+eisenberg%22 results in nothing spanning 10 years back or anything that seems to be the interview referred to.

Let's try Google. If it's in published form on the Internet, Google would probably have it. https://www.google.com/search?q="leon+eisenberg"+"adhd"&hl=en&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2/1/2009,cd_max:9/14/2009 doesn't return any articles from between the beginning of February 2009 up to his death in September.

Well, crap, I don't know where else to look that would give good results from that far back.

Oh wait, what if the interview was held by a German entity? Let's check. https://www.google.com/search?q="leon+eisenberg"+"adhs"&hl=en&tbs=cdr:1,cd_min:2/1/2009,cd_max:9/14/2009&lr=lang_de doesn't pull up any interviews either.

I'll just stop here and give this an eyebrow raise. Der Spiegel is referring to an interview that isn't easily findable, and they don't provide the interview source. I'll give them the benefit of the doubt though and say my searching skills suck, or Der Spiegel happened to be at the interview when it happened, or it got published into a magazine that never got mentioned on the Internet.

Let's get back to the Der Spiegel Wikipedia page.

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>2018 fabrication scandal

>On 19 December 2018, Der Spiegel made public that reporter Claas Relotius had admitted that he had "falsified his articles on a grand scale", inventing facts, persons and quotations in at least 14 of his stories.[19][20] The magazine uncovered the fraud after a co-author of one of Relotius's stories, Juan Moreno, became suspicious of the veracity of Relotius's contributions and gathered evidence against him.[20] Relotius resigned, telling the magazine that he was "sick" and needed to get help. Der Spiegel left his articles accessible, but with a notice referring to the magazine's ongoing investigation into the fabrications.[19]

Damn. That's a lot to unpack. So let's start. Who is "Claas Relotius" and what articles did he write? We obviously cannot trust anything this guy has written. More specifically, did he write this article about Leon Eisenberg?

Okay, our Leon Eisenberg article is written by "Jörg Blech". Whew. The article's potential for being true dodged a huge bullet here. Let's see who this person is though.

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SIDE TANGENT TIME #2

Here's what his Wikipedia page says:

>Jörg Blech (born 1966) is a German science journalist and nonfiction author.

>He is known primarily as a critic of the healthcare and pharmaceutical industries. His books cover such subjects as the healthcare industry's alleged invention of diseases to generate sales and medical treatments that turned out to harm people.

This could mean he has vested interests in what he writes, or it could mean he's a very diligent and focused journalist. Either way, this information is not cited; so let's just dismiss it. We can't use this information.

>He studied biology and biochemistry in Germany and Britain.

Okay, he might be educated on biology or biochemistry, but as there is no citation, it's possible he may have just taken a biology class and a biochemistry class at two different universities because the sentence would still hold true in that case. I wouldn't necessarily say he's educated because I don't know what his test scores were. So let's just dismiss this information. We can't use this either.

>In addition to his books, which have been translated into English, French, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Polish, Chinese and Korean,[1] he writes for the German publication Der Spiegel. His book, Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills : Pharmaceutical Companies and the Medicalisation of Normal Life,[2] was reviewed by several journals.[3][4]

Well, I would love to see how they reviewed his book about inventing diseases but the citations are of physical media I have no access to. Let's look up the book though and see what the Internet says about it.

Let's check the book out on Amazon first. https://www.amazon.com/dp/0415390710/ has a summary. Let's check it out.

>This is a highly accessible and reassuring account of how the pharmaceutical industry is redefining health, making it a state that is almost impossible to achieve. Many normal life processes – states as natural as birth, ageing, sexuality, unhappiness and death – are systematically being reinterpreted as pathological so creating new markets for their treatments. In this enlightening book, Jörg Blech reveals:

> how the invention of diseases by pharmaceutical companies is turning us all into patients, and how we can protect ourselves against this
> how the medical profession has been bullied and co-opted into endorsing profitable cures for people who aren't ill
>* fears about how pharmaceutical companies create markets by playing on the general public's concern with their health.

>A self-help book in the truest sense, Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills reassures us about our own health. It is essential reading for doctors, nurses and patients alike.