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. Among the questionable practices he describes are: the disturbing number of senior academic physicians who have financial arrangements with drug companies; the unregulated "front" organizations that advocate certain drugs; the creation of biased medical education materials by the drug companies themselves; and the use of financially conflicted physicians to write clinical practice guidelines or to testify before the FDA in support of a particular drug. 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.

HBSWK Book Report: On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health: Book review @ Harvard Business School Working Knowledge (@ HBS Working Knowledge)

Fired left wingers last swipe at his colleagues
Jerome Kassirer uses his narrow left wing view to smear the profession of medicine with a broad brush stemming from his narrow sequestered view in his Ivory tower. Kassirer,who advocates smoking pot is a left wing ideologue completely out of touch with practicing physicians throughout the country. He thinks that a pad or pen or a meal will influence the careful decision a physician makes in choosing the right medication for his patient. He wants to tell me who I can eat dinner with and who I can talk to about drugs I use in my practice. I am an accomplished physician who spends his time healing many patients with fabulous meds advanced by cooperation between physicians and the pharmaceutical companies. I dont sit in the Harvard library pontificating. Im out there seeing patients and making them feel better as a Rheumatologist. The medications I use have improved greatly over the 25 years I have been in practice and the benefits to patients have been immeasurable.When I make a decision about a prescription its a careful one and depends on cost, diagnosis, side effects , convenience and possible interactions. If I ever gave a talk to other doctors about a new drug it was based on FDA approved material and I was never coerced or told what I had to say. Important information was learned by colleagues and professional discourse was facilitated. This book is written by a man whose salary as NEJM editor was likely enhanced for years by drug ads in his publication. This is a man who profits from a book he uses to smear an entire profession of healers that work hard with many pressures on them. Need I mention all the excessive billing of patients by teaching physicians that they likely barely saw or didnt see and let the fellows and residents do the work on for years( the government put a stop to this for all academics.). His co moron in all this is Marcia Angell( a pathologist} and editor of NEJM who suggest that we should limit the amount of new drugs to market if they are not substantially different than previous ones. Any practicing physician knows that medications may be metabolized differently and have different side effects and still be in the same class. Some patients do well on one ,others do well on another. Marcia ,who never gave a drug to a live person feels it necessary to talk about a subject entirely out of her domain. That is what the stuffy NEJM editor's chair does to people. It makes them feel more important than they really are. The problem is that the liberal ideologues are winning and we will soon have a dumbed down health system and fewer new drugs to help people. But at least we aren't getting free pens anymore.