Since the 1990s, historians of medicine have pointed to a change in the status and self-image of patients in the West. Patients, it is claimed, have gone from being passively dependent on medicine to active consumers of health care. However, this narrative does not consider the fact that Western countries differ a great deal in terms of access to health care, access to alternative treatments and the role and status assigned to formal expertise in society at large. This study aims to contribute to a deeper and more historically nuanced understanding of the transformation of the patient into a consumer. Through an analysis of the Swedish THX movement - a patient movement trying to achieve legal access to, and formal approval of, the controversial anti-cancer drug THX in the 1970s - the study shows how the agenda and demands of the THX patients mirrored the specific Swedish settings in which they were articulated. THX patients did not wish to be regarded as consumers or clients. On the contrary, their arguments were firmly rooted in a collective identity as "the people" who expected the state and politicians to meet their needs. They emphasized their collective experience as evidence of the efficiency of THX and pointed to the popularity of THX treatment, thereby rejecting the results of several scientific trials initiated by the medical authorities. Doing so, THX patients made use of the culturally resonant frame of collectivity in Sweden at the time, as well as of a widespread belief that the medical authorities were corrupt and insensitive to the needs of ordinary people.