Overdosed America
by John Abramson · first published 2004
100% recommend
This book explains how the pharmaceutical companies distort medical knowledge, mislead doctors, and compromise the health of patients.
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…by cleaning up all the corruption in pharma and the FDA. The two books I've read that both have some pretty good stats and recommendations on this are: The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell Overdosed America by John Abramson The problems are way too numerous to list, but they're extremely important. The second thing that needs to change is that we need more data about the state of health care, as well as…
on “How to stop hospitals from killing us” ↗…especially considering the US is the only first world country where direct-to-consumer marketing is allowed for medications. Relevant book on this topic, and highly recommended read: https://www.amazon.com/Overdosed-America-Promise-American-Me...
on “U.S. to make More Drugs Easily Available, Cutting Role Doctors Play” ↗…This is a pretty big claim for a FDA-approved drug that was the most profitable drug on the market as of 2011." There are a bunch of books about this that you can get on Amazon. A good one I read is Overdosed America. But if you search on Amazon for 'statin' there are a lot more books that are specifically about this. "A quick literature search found Lipitor to be more efficacious[3] (Double blinded, placebo controlled,…
on “The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill” ↗> There are a bunch of books about this that you can get on Amazon. A good one I read is Overdosed America. But if you search on Amazon for 'statin' there are a lot more books that are specifically about this. Make an argument here and cite your sources here, I'm not going to read a book just so I can respond…
on “The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill” ↗…did for the benefit of you and anyone else who is interested. You could instead read Wikipedia and random papers you find on Google scholar, but I don't think you'll really learn much that way. And in Overdosed America it's really only one or two chapters that are relevant. "How's a paper in a top tier medical journal[1]?" Not really worth much unless it's a large NIH trial, a well-cited meta study, or an IOM report.…
on “The $2.7 Trillion Medical Bill” ↗…makes sense on paper doesn't mean that it's actually true. There are a number of books about the issues with drug trials... Bad Pharma by Ben Goldacre, The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell, Overdosed America, etc. All of these books cover largely different issues, so imho it's worth reading them all.
on “The Placebo Effect Doesn’t Apply Just to Pills” ↗The former head editor of NEJM wrote a book called The Truth About Drug Companies that describes it in good detail. Also the book The Emperors New Drugs and the book Overdosed America. The first is about phase 4 trials, the other books cover more general issues with phase 1-3 trials not getting published.
on “It’s time all clinical trial results are reported” ↗It was Pfizer that pioneered that, and it's cataloged wonderfully in the book "Overdosed America"
on “Princeton’s Ad-Blocker May Put an End to the Ad-Blocking Arms Race” ↗…least judging from this example, the majority of his book is sourced from two earlier books that were written about the FDA and the American drug system: The Truth About Drug Companies by Marcia Angell Overdosed America by Jonathan Abrams Those were published in 2004 and 2005, so there are a few studies published since then on the influence of pharma funding on trial outcomes, but nothing that contradicts the earlier…
on “Ben Goldacre: Here’s the foreword to my new book, Bad Pharma” ↗…Researchers also found that 'the greater involvement of clinical experts in the development process of the clinical practice guidelines, the less of recommendations reflected the research evidence.'" Source: Overdosed America, p. 127
on “Fighting Against Evidence” ↗2) C.f. statins. There are any number of books that talk about this. Overdosed America comes to mind, but you'd be hard pressed to find any recent book about the pharma industry that doesn't talk about statins. 3) C.f. SSRIs, and Robert Whitaker's book anatomy of an epidemic.
on “Europe votes for clinical trial transparency” ↗…the published data? In an understated way, these researchers were telling doctors that they could not trust the published scientific evidence about antidepressants to be complete and unbiased." Source: Overdosed America, p. 115 "Whereas many of the negative trials were not published at all, some of the positive trias were published many times, a practice known as 'salami slicing', and this was often done in ways that…
on “Ecstasy for PTSD: Not Ready for Prime Time” ↗…Antiomicrobrial Resistance - Issues and Options Books: Anatomy of an Epidemic (Mental health) The Emperor's New Drugs (Mental health) Crazy Like Us (Mental health) The Truth About Drug Companies (Pharma) Overdosed America (Pharma) Health Behavior Change and Treatment Adherence: Evidence-based Guidelines for Improving Healthcare (Medical adherence) This list doesn't do a great job of covering certain niche problems like…
on “How to Get Startup Ideas” ↗