welcome to our blog – submit your conference proposal soon

This is Leonore Tiefer starting off our conference blog from New York. There are already many wonderful blogs and books and videos about disease-mongering – overdiagnosis, overtreatment, overmarketing, overmedicalization, conflicts of interest – and we won’t try to compete! But our Selling Sickness, 2013: People before Profits conference will bring together some of the leading thinkers and activists in this field, and we will use this blog to punctuate our conference planning as we move forward. We want to highlight our cosponsoring groups and organizations, the books we will be featuring in our BOOKTIVISM project, the way our GOOD NEWS EXHIBIT HALL expo is shaping up, and the speakers who are committing to participate. The call for papers closes October 1, and we are eager to see workshops, presentations and posters from the community of scholars, journalists and activists working on these issues, so don’t delay submitting your proposal. We already have great-looking submissions that look at topics like international pharmacovigilance, overdiagnosis of eating disorders, new roles for community activist groups, and social benefits of pharmaceutical industry mass torts, just to give a taste. Let’s hear from as many of you as possible and get a broad representation of voices and views.