Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors And Harm Patients (2012) - Plot & Excerpts
He argues that the drug industry is corrupted and it's corruption trickles over into the lives of doctors and patients, causing harm to everybody. According to what he brought to the table in his book, I would wholeheartedly agree. This book opened my eyes to the dirt of an industry drugs are and the vastness of ways it can be improved. This book has forever changed my view of medicine and, more importantly, medicines. I will do my best to never need to take them for the simple fact that nearly all drugs are not well studied as they are purported to be, especially new ones. Also, I will be extremely conservative in allowing my children one day to take any old drug and discourage my wife at all costs. Thanks, Ben. Your amazing, well-cited, well-researched, well-documented, well-explained efforts have made me a better scientist, a better skeptic, a better citizen, and a healthier me. Cheers. If you have skipped this book because the names makes you think of tinfoil hat conspiracy theorists, take another look. Bad Pharma is a nicely sourced, polemic but very sobering look at the seedier practices of the pharmaceutical industry, whose tendency to bury unfavourable research, ghostwrite papers, influence doctors and patient groups alike with extravagant marketing etc. has tainted the academic medical literature for decades. Not to mention detailing the failures of the regulators, whose demands are quite often false fixes, or simply and blatantly ignored. This book should be required reading for anyone dealing with health policies, as well as doctors and patients. Obviously this isn't the final word on the issue, but it definitely injects a hefty dose of realism to academic idealism.
What do You think about Bad Pharma: How Drug Companies Mislead Doctors And Harm Patients (2012)?
A bit dense and tedious... but that's probably due to the subject matter.
—rita
I'm excited about how fucked medical research is.
—Rosh
