Healthy Skepticism Library item: 8829

Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.

Publication type: book

Angell M.
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
New York: Random House 2004
http://www.randomhouse.com/acmart/?view=about

Abstract:

Currently Americans spend a staggering $200 billion each year on prescription drugs. As Dr. Angell argues in her new book, The Truth About the Drug Companies, this is both unnecessary and unethical.

A former editor in chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, a current member of Harvard’s Medical School’s Department of Social Medicine, and a nationally recognized authority in the field of health policy and medical ethics, Dr. Angell argues authoritatively that the pharmaceutical industry has strayed from its original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and has instead become a vast marketing machine with unprecedented control over its own fortune. To help support her claims, she points to specific examples of how drug companies have gained nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs.

Zeroing in on hugely successful drugs like AZT (the first drug to treat HIV/AIDS), Taxol (the best-selling cancer drug in history), and the blockbuster allergy drug Claritin, Dr. Angell demonstrates exactly how new products are brought to market. Drug companies, she argues, routinely rely on publicly funded institutions for their basic research; they rig clinical trials to make their products look better than they are; and they use their legions of lawyers to stretch out government-granted exclusive marketing rights for years. They also, she asserts, flood the market with copycat drugs that cost a lot more than the drugs they mimic but are no more effective.

Written with fierce passion and substantiated with in-depth research, The Truth About the Drug Companies is not only a searing indictment of an industry spun out of control, it is also a prescriptive and forward-looking argument for a program of necessary and vital reforms.