100 books like The Truth About the Drug Companies

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. 

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. 

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.

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.

This account of the early years of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, from its inception as a scrappy start-up to its early work in HIV, is a must-read classic for anyone interested in how science turns into new drugs. Barry Werth’s journalistic play-by-play is a cinematic, true-to-life picture of the strategic decisions, real-world challenges, and larger-than-life personalities that underlie modern drug development. His riveting follow-up, The Antidote, continues the saga by taking readers through Vertex’s pathbreaking work to transform the care of patients with hepatitis C and cystic fibrosis.

A best-seller in the UK, it never garnered the attention it deserved in the US. As a trained physician, Goldacre explains why doctors cannot trust the information concerning prescription drugs that is made available to them, and why this should concern every patient. The incentives motivating drug regulators constitute a big part of the problem, but the actual conduct of clinical trials comes in for intensive scrutiny as well. The rigors of double-blinded trials are useless if owners of the data can hide whatever outcomes they don’t like. His chapter on how to bend a clinical trial has become a classic.

Two pharmacists sit in a Boston courtroom accused of murder. The weapon: a fungus. The death count: 100 and rising. These facts set the stage for a true-crime thriller by investigative journalist Jason Dearen, and it has the makings of a horror movie. There’s scientific hubris, sketchy ethics, a cover-up, and a monster, too: a slimy, sticky, fungal mold that infected patients and began eating their brains alive. It’s riveting, packed with information about how fungal spores managed to contaminate a medical supply chain, and frankly hard to put down. I have done my share of forensic research, and never have I encountered killer fungus before; I consider this an unmissable book.

This is the first of Dervla’s Detective Cormac Reilly books - and what a wonderful start to a new series.

Here is a book as dark and unpredictable as the early spring weather in Galway. Cormac springs to life, fully formed as a complex, honest policeman, uncompromising and determined to solve a case that has re-emerged after haunting him for over twenty years.

Back then he rescued a little boy and his sister from terrible squalor and abuse. Now grown up, that boy has apparently committed suicide and his missing sister has returned claiming he was murdered and accusing the police of a cover up.

Add to this, Cormac’s own problems with a new posting in Galway, a hostile squad of detectives and a relationship he’s frantically trying to hold on to. A wonderful, complex, engrossing book.

In All That’s Left To Say, dual timelines braid threads of a mystery together in a way that allowed me to contrast Hannah then and now and wonder not just about the mystery Hannah’s trying to solve, but about how she became the master sleuth she thinks she needs to be to get answers.

This contrast, as much as the mystery, drew me into the story and had me turning pages every time we jumped between past and present. Of course, the enemies-to-friends-to-lovers romance also helped. How Lord imbued a single tie-straightening scene with more sexual tension than most kissing scenes might be the biggest mystery in this book.

Like Green for Danger, this is a more classic mystery novel, though it is also a dystopian fiction.

The ‘hospital’ in which it is set is a facility for the elderly, who, denied access to antibiotics, wait there until, through accident or nature, they contract an infection and are allowed to die. Yet much of the novel takes place years earlier in South Africa and England, before the antibiotic crisis when the main character meets the love of her life. How we have progressed from today’s society to the society described in the book is gradually revealed, as is the narrator’s part in it. There are also mysterious happenings in the facility.

This is a vividly told tale set in an all too believable near future with restricted access to life-saving drugs. I admire the clever conceit and the intricate interweaving of past and present and was caught up… show more.