“These are the pieces of the puzzle that, when put together, show how drug companies convince doctors to prescribe their expensive new drugs even when they offer little or no added value (and sometimes harm) compared to less expensive alternatives.” “As an expert in litigation, I have had access to manufacturers’ scientific data as well as their business and marketing plans,” Abramson writes. The first few chapters are sprinkled with dramatic courtroom sequences, demonstrating his long-standing reputation, as writer William Heisel described him in 2009, as an “outspoken critic of the pharmaceutical industry.” health care industry and how they can cause undue suffering, starting with several recent pharmaceutical scandals that have cost the lives of thousands of Americans while enriching major corporations.Ībramson, who has also worked as a family physician for years, has served as a legal expert in about 15 civil trials involving drugmakers, in which he highlighted the drug industry’s flawed research and shrewd marketing tactics. The book is a crash course in the profit-driven systems built by Big Pharma that dominate the U.S.
According to a 2020 survey, two-thirds of consumers live in fear of medical bills.
Yet recent research suggests that 46 million Americans can’t afford health care. In the book, Abramson reveals how doctors are regularly duped into prescribing expensive drugs with extreme side effects while major pharmaceutical companies rake in record profits. In “ Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It,” Abramson sets out to answer the “paradox of American health care,” building his case using the testimony of patients and former drug executives.īOOK REVIEW - “Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It,” by John Abramson (Mariner Books, 336 pages). trails behind the average for 28 other countries.Īccording to John Abramson, a health care policy lecturer at Harvard Medical School, the sap of this poisoned tree is so-called Big Pharma, the coalition of drug companies that have structured American health care into a money-generating machine. There is the diabetes crisis, the obesity crisis, and, of course, the despair crisis, which includes the rising tide of suicides, alcohol poisoning, and drug overdoses - claiming an average of 70,000 lives annually from 2005 to 2019. Even before the Covid-19 pandemic accelerated health disparities, crisis on top of crisis has compounded to create even more devastating conditions for a growing number of people, especially marginalized groups. C ompared to other high-income countries, the fitness of Americans is in dismal shape - and has been declining for decades.
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