We are very pleased to announce that earlier this month (August 2026) Alan Cassels, who is a highly acclaimed and very well-known drug policy researcher and author has joined the Board of Directors of Canada Health Alliance.

Alan is our second new Director to join our Board in 2026 (Lynda McLeod being the first who joined in July), and he brings a great deal of experience, knowledge and an extraordinary passion for the truth to our Board.

Alan, who lives on Vancouver Island strongly believes that humans need clean, clear health information as urgently as they need clean water. Consequently, he has been immersed in pharmaceutical policy research and healthcare journalism for over 30 years, mostly researching and writing about how prescription drugs are regulated, marketed, prescribed and used.

He has a Bachelor’s Degree in English Literature from the Royal Military College of Canada and a Master’s Degree in Public Administration specializing in pharmaceutical policy. His niche is in examining the gaps between the marketing and the science around prescription drugs and medical screening, frequently exposing the many forces of disease creation.

His books include Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies are Turning us All into Patients (co-written with Ray Moynihan), The ABCs of Disease Mongering: An Epidemic in 26 Letters, and Seeking Sickness: Medical Screening and the Misguided Hunt for Disease. His last book is The Cochrane Collaboration: Medicine’s Best Kept Secret, about the history of this important organization that helps synthesize medical research.

In his writings Alan focuses on the needs of the end-user, ordinary people like you and I, facing the sharp end of the medical industry’s marketing machine which is increasingly selling us tests, treatments and theories of disease that threaten to turn more and more of us into patients.

He currently works as an independent researcher and writer, is a Fellow of the Brownstone Institute (www.brownstone.org), and consults for the Finnish Centre for Evidence-Based Orthopaedics (www.ficebo.com) based in Helsinki.

We are also very pleased to be running one of Alan’s recent articles as published by the Brownstone Institute below, making today’s edition of the CHA Newsletter, a “full feature” of Alan’s great research and writing.

On behalf of all the Board of Directors and all CHA Members we welcome Alan and look forward to the positive influence he will have on our organization and on our efforts to expose the blight of disease creation that we have seen in North America over the last few decades.