On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health
We all know that doctors accept gifts from drug companies, ranging
from pens and coffee mugs to free vacations at luxurious resorts.
But as the former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of
Medicine reveals in this shocking expose, these innocuous-seeming
gifts are just the tip of an iceberg that is distorting the
practice of medicine and jeopardizing the health of millions of
Americans today.
In On the Take, Dr. Jerome Kassirer offers an unsettling look at
the pervasive payoffs that physicians take from big drug companies
and other medical suppliers, arguing that the billion-dollar
onslaught of industry money has deflected many physicians'
moral compasses and directly impacted the everyday care we receive
from the doctors and institutions we trust most. Underscored by
countless chilling untold stories, the book illuminates the
financial connections between the wealthy companies that make drugs
and the doctors who prescribe them. Kassirer details the shocking
extent of these financial enticements and explains how they
encourage bias, promote dangerously misleading medical information,
raise the cost of medical care, and breed distrust.
A brilliant diagnosis of an epidemic of greed, On the Take offers
insight into how we can cure the medical profession and restore our
trust in doctors and hospitals.
Jerome P. Kassirer is Distinguished Professor at Tufts University School of Medicine and Adjunct Professor of Medicine and Bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Clevland, Ohio. He was Editor-in-Chief of New England Journal of Medicine for more than 8 years.
