Why am I passionate about this?

In my younger days, as the son of a medical professor and a public health nurse, I was more interested in healing society than patients. But my political interests and research agenda as a professor of political science ultimately led back to medicine. I found that profit-maximizing market competition in health care failed miserably to promote value in therapeutics and economize on society’s scarce resources. I became aware of the neglect of public health to prevent disease for vulnerable groups in society and save money as well as lives. Pervasive and enduring economic conflicts of interest in the medical-industrial complex bear primary responsibility for severe deficits in quality, equality, and economy in American health care.


I wrote

Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine

By Peter A. Swenson,

Book cover of Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine

What is my book about?

Tracing conflicts inside organized medicine and its relations with society concerning quality, equality, and economy in health care from the…

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of Pills, Power, and Policy: The Struggle for Drug Reform in Cold War America and Its Consequences

Peter A. Swenson Why did I love this book?

I found, as a history buff, The Struggle for Drug Reform to be an eye-opener about how America’s exceptionally high drug prices among other deficits in health care quality and coverage resulted from the past exercise of power by the pharmaceutical industry, the lynchpin of America’s “medico-industrial complex.”

I was impressed by historian Tobbell’s meticulously researched account of the industry’s strategic alliances with self-interested medical scientists, not just conservative political forces, and its use of anti-communist propaganda to fight off the threat of drug pricing regulations.

I personally found important her discussions of how the industry allied with the American Medical Association against universal health care, against FDA demands for evidence about drug efficacy and safety before allowing drugs on the market, and against the threat to its profits from generic drugs. 

By Dominique Tobbell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Pills, Power, and Policy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Since the 1950s, the American pharmaceutical industry has been heavily criticized for its profit levels, the high cost of prescription drugs, drug safety problems, and more, yet it has, together with the medical profession, staunchly and successfully opposed regulation. "Pills, Power, and Policy" offers a lucid history of how the American drug industry and key sectors of the medical profession came to be allies against pharmaceutical reform. It details the political strategies they have used to influence public opinion, shape legislative reform, and define the regulatory environment of prescription drugs. Untangling the complex relationships between drug companies, physicians, and academic…


Book cover of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It

Peter A. Swenson Why did I love this book?

I find Angell’s The Truth About the Drug Companies extremely valuable for teaching students about how the pharmaceutical industry translates high profits into power resources to protect and increase those profits over time.

The former New England Journal of Medicine editor exposed how drug companies enlist politicians, the FDA, and medical academia for their cause. And armies of lawyers to extend monopoly marketing rights for years.

It was my first introduction to how they spend more on marketing than research, much of that on “copy-cat” drugs of dubious superiority to ones with expired patents.

As a tax (and high drug price) payer, I was disturbed to learn how they use government funds for basic research and then rig and spin their reporting of clinical studies to inflate their products’ therapeutic value and underplay their risks. 

By Marcia Angell,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Truth About the Drug Companies as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

During her two decades at The New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Marcia Angell had a front-row seat on the appalling spectacle of the pharmaceutical industry. She watched drug companies stray from their original mission of discovering and manufacturing useful drugs and instead become vast marketing machines with unprecedented control over their own fortunes. She saw them gain nearly limitless influence over medical research, education, and how doctors do their jobs. She sympathized as the American public, particularly the elderly, struggled and increasingly failed to meet spiraling prescription drug prices. Now, in this bold, hard-hitting new book, Dr. Angell exposes…


Book cover of On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health

Peter A. Swenson Why did I love this book?

Kassirer, also like Angell a highly respected physician and former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, first opened my eyes to how extensively drug companies use their vast wealth to turn physicians into promoters and middlemen.

I knew about the small and not-so-small gifts, speaking fees, travel junkets, and the like to individual doctors and “key opinion leaders” of the profession, but not about the “institutional conflicts of interest” gladly entered into by specialty medical societies heavily dependent on drug money for their events and activities such as scientific meetings, journal publishing, clinical practice recommendations, and, not least “continuing medical education” required by law for license maintenance.

Although Kassirer, also like Angell, proposed reforms, from what I know about conditions today, not much has changed, so On the Take remains an indispensable window into corrupted medicine. 

By Jerome P. Kassirer,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked On the Take as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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…


Book cover of Psychiatry Under the Influence: Institutional Corruption, Social Injury, and Prescriptions for Reform

Peter A. Swenson Why did I love this book?

I was deeply impressed by how Psychiatry Under the Influence combines medical history, clinical knowledge, and investigative journalism about pervasive institutional conflicts of interest in medicine.

In Whitaker’s and Cosgrove’s case study of “institutional corruption” they trace the development over time of an alignment of the psychiatric profession’s “guild interests” in turf maximization and scientific legitimation with drug companies’ drive to market a widening array of drugs massively profitable drugs.

It is a fascinating illustration of the medicalization of life resulting from what I would call the “commercial construction of disease.”

Particularly eye-opening was the role of the American Psychiatric Association in constructing pseudo-scientific diagnostic categories of psychoses, panics, anxieties, depressive states, and the like for drug companies to capitalize on—and concealing, distorting, and fabricating research results that facilitate mass overprescribing of potentially harm-causing drugs.

By Robert Whitaker, Robert Whitaker, Lisa Cosgrove

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Psychiatry Under the Influence as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Psychiatry Under the Influence investigates the actions and practices of the American Psychiatric Association and academic psychiatry in the United States, and presents it as a case study of institutional corruption.


Book cover of Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It

Peter A. Swenson Why did I love this book?

If you think that medical journals published by respected medical societies are full of good science, think again.

For me, Abramson’s Sickening nailed the case for a conclusion that the net effect of the many hundreds of medical journals published here and around the world is to subtract from the sum of human medical knowledge.

Abramson, as an expert witness in criminal and civil cases against drug companies, draws in part on subpoenaed documents to expose how medical science, as part of the entire medical-industrial complex, is corrupted from start to finish by the drug industry’s funding of most clinical trials, their control over the data analysis, and even their ghost-writing of articles submitted to journals.

New and disturbing was the withholding of clinical trials’ raw data from journals’ peer reviewers. Instead, they get biased summaries bearing drug manufacturers’ fingerprints.

By John Abramson,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Sickening as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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.

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. 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.…


Explore my book 😀

Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine

By Peter A. Swenson,

Book cover of Disorder: A History of Reform, Reaction, and Money in American Medicine

What is my book about?

Tracing conflicts inside organized medicine and its relations with society concerning quality, equality, and economy in health care from the distant past to the present, Swenson’s Disorder illuminates how intensely politicized health care in America has been. It chronicles, first, the remarkably progressive character of the American Medical Association’s reform ambitions in therapeutics, medical training, and public health around the beginning of the twentieth century. He then details its sudden reactionary turn in the 1920s and ensuing decades of political medical conservatism, racism, and sexism. Throughout, he paints a disturbing picture of the entanglements of medicine, politics, and profit-seeking—especially by the pharmaceutical industry—that explains why the United States, exceptionally, still lacks universal health care, a well-functioning public health system, and a healthy population. 

Book cover of Pills, Power, and Policy: The Struggle for Drug Reform in Cold War America and Its Consequences
Book cover of The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
Book cover of On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health

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Why should I read it?

3 authors picked The Coaching Habit as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

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