Physician: Medicine and the Unsuspected Battle for Human Freedom
The former chief editor of “Alternative Medicine Digest” asserts that the struggle between conventional and alternative medicine is a matter of politics, philosophy, and economics, rather than real medical effectiveness.
Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine
According to Abramson, Americans are overmedicated and overmedicalized as a result of the commercialization of health care. Falling prey to marketing campaigns, we demand unnecessary and expensive drugs and procedures, believing they constitute the best possible medical care.
The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
Many Americans have wondered why prescription drugs have become so expensive while advertising for those drugs seems to grow exponentially. Former New England Journal of Medicine Editor Marcia Angell has some answers. The pharmaceutical industry, according to Angell, is fraught with corruption and doing a disservice to customers, the federal government, and to the medical establishment itself. In The Truth About the Drug Companies, Angell explains how a huge portion of the revenue generated by "Big Pharma" goes not into research and development but into aggressive marketing campaigns to sell their product. She describes how, even though the drug companies claim that it costs them an average of 802 million dollars per drug to develop new medicines, that figure is obscenely inflated since it factors in marketing as well as expected interest the company would have received had they invested the money in the open market. Meanwhile, Angell says, most of the R & D work is done by colleges and universities funded by the government. There are also problems with the drugs themselves, Angell indicates, since a majority are "me-too drugs", slightly modified versions of existing products which meant to address concerns of consumers most likely to spend money on pharmaceuticals. Thus, the market is filled with remarkably similar drugs to treat depression and high cholesterol while potentially life-saving medicines for diseases afflicting third-world countries are discontinued because they aren't profitable. In the books most damning passage, Angell tells of the high-priced junkets offered to doctors, ostensibly offered as educational opportunities that seem to constitute little more than bribes. The prognosis for reform is a grim one, Angell indicates, due to the massive cash reserves and lobbying efforts of "Big Pharma." Indeed, that lobby was hard at work trying to discredit her claims immediately upon the book's publication. But for anyone who's paid a pharmacy bill, The Truth About the Drug Companies is a fascinating read.
From Publishers Weekly In what should serve as the Fast Food Nation of the drug industry, Angell, former editor of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, presents a searing indictment of "big pharma" as corrupt and corrupting: of Congress, through huge campaign contributions; of the FDA, which is funded in part by the very companies it oversees; and, perhaps most shocking, of members of the medical profession and its institutions. Angell delineates how the drug giants, such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca, pay physicians to prescribe their products with gifts, junkets and marketing programs disguised as "professional education." According to Angell, the cost of marketing, both to physicians and consumers, far outweighs expenditures on research and development, though drug makers invoke R&D as the reason drug prices are so high. In fact, says Angell, with combined 2002 profits of $35.9 billion for the Fortune 500's top 10 drug companies, the drug industry is America's most profitable by far, thanks to disproportionately high prices, generous tax breaks and manipulation of patents to extend exclusive marketing rights to blockbuster drugs like Prozac and Claritin. Angell mounts a powerful case (and offers specific suggestions) for reform of this essential industry—a case worth bearing in mind as "big pharma" continues to oppose importing cheaper drugs from Canada.
Racketeering in Medicine: The Suppression of Alternatives
How the AMA, FDA and pharmaceutical industry has for years tried to discredit natural, less expensive, less invasive and often times more effective modalities of treatment.
Over Dose: The Case Against the Drug Companies: Prescription Drugs, Side Effects, and Your Health
FDA regulations, kickbacks to doctors from pharmaceutical companies, ghostwritten articles commissioned by pharmaceutical companies and attributed to independent doctors in trusted medical journals.
Bitter Pills: Inside the Hazardous World of Legal Drugs
In the U.S. alone, between 45,000 and 200,000 people die annually of reactions to legal drugs (2 to 9 percent of the 2.3 million Americans who die each year) versus the 5,000 to 10,000 who die of illegal drug use. This book exposes how (and why) the FDA and drug companies are indifferent.
The Big Fix: How the Pharmaceutical Industry Rips Off American Consumers (Publicaffairs Reports)
A meticulously reported expose uncovers exactly how the drug industry boosts sales and bilks consumers in the most lucrative prescription drug market in the world.
Prescription for Disaster: the Hidden Dangers in Your Medicine Cabinet
There is no such thing as a safe drug,” asserts Thomas J. Moore, who researched drug safety as a senior fellow in health policy at George Washington University.
Censured for Curing Cancer: The American Experience of Dr. Max Gerson
Mr. Haught, an investigative journalist, started out to do an expose on a “quack”, and soon found himself writing about a grand conspiracy to suppress a holistic cure for cancer. He details the coverup of Dr. Gerson’s work with documentary evidence from books, newspapers and even the Congressional Record.
The Cancer Conspiracy: Betrayal, Collusion and the Suppression of Alternative Cancer Treatments
This book deals with the medical and drug company collusion in the United States. But this same dangerous collusion is worldwide.
The Cancer Cure That Worked: 50 Years of Suppression
This book describes the work of Royal Rife and of other great pioneers like Dr Arthur Kendall and Dr Edward Rosenow, and how their work was suppressed by certain individuals who at that time were in positions of power in organizations such as the American Medical Association, the Rockefeller Institute and the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.
The Healing of Cancer: The Cures the Cover-Ups and the Solution Now!
“The Healing of Cancer” is a challenge to the doctors, bureaucrats and businessmen who are letting thousands die of cancer each week while a cure exists. It is also a challenge to the average citizen to stop being silent while so many innocent victims undergo torture because of medical profiteering, outmoded thinking and a good deal of corrupt politics.
Critical Condition: How Health Care in America Became Big Business--and Bad Medicine
Bestselling investigative journalists Barlett and Steele (America: What Went Wrong?) deliver a devastating indictment, supported by excellent research, of a health-care system that they say is failing to provide first-rate services to its citizens, 44 million of whom are without insurance.
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