And unlike other countries, the US has allowed drug companies to charge as much as they want. Unfortunately, the primary goal of the drug companies is not to improve patient health, but to maximize profits. Today, drug companies (big pharma) and commercial interests predominate in providing the information doctors rely on to determine patient treatment. Over the last 40 years, funding for research and federal support of university-based research has declined, and the big drug companies have stepped in to fill the gap. The US currrently spends nearly 20% of its GDP on health care, much, much more than any other wealth country, yet ranks 68th in quality of health care in the world. The premise of this book is that the US health care system is getting worse, and a large cause of this is big pharma. medical-industrial complex, Sickening shines a light on the dark underbelly of American health care-and presents a path toward genuine reform. The result of years of research and privileged access to the inner workings of the U.S. Likewise for the experts who write the clinical practice guidelines that define our standards of care. For example, one of pharma’s best-kept secrets is that the peer reviewers charged with ensuring the accuracy and completeness of the clinical trial reports published in medical journals do not even have access to complete data and must rely on manufacturer-influenced summaries.
John Abramson-one of the foremost experts on the drug industry’s deceptive tactics-combines patient stories with what he learned during many years of serving as an expert in national drug litigation to reveal the tangled web of financial interests at the heart of the dysfunction in our health-care system. At the heart of the problem is Big Pharma, which funds most clinical trials and therefore controls the research agenda, withholds the real data from those trials as corporate secrets, and shapes most of the information relied upon by health care professionals. The United States spends an excess $1.5 trillion annually on health care compared to other wealthy countries-yet the amount of time that Americans live in good health ranks a lowly 68th in the world. The inside story of how Big Pharma’s relentless pursuit of ever-higher profits corrupts medical knowledge-misleading doctors, misdirecting American health care, and harming our health.
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