[12.12] Illness Journey

• I was in ventricular tachycardia
• The medicines wouldn’t bring me out of it
• Illness story [12.56] to [14.23]
• The thought you’d have is Abramson is criticizing medicine
• Abramson is the beneficiary of the most high-tech medicine
• United States having a monopoly on all good ideas & medical innovation

[17.29] Pharma Industry

• Practicing doctors cannot be aware of what’s going on
• It takes training in statistics & epidemiology
• Generally, the data is not available
• VIOXX was a particularly interesting situation
• Merck the manufacturer turned enough data over to FDA
• Merck showed this was a dangerous drug & had benefit for very few people
• The article published in the New England Journal didn’t include the dangers
• I wrote a book, and it was published & there was a deafening silence
• World got lucky that the drug got pulled
• My new career allowed me to see 20 cases
• Each case has access to 20 confidential corporate documents

[21.22] Big Pharma

• Big pharma is embedded in the context of advanced capitalism
• Their job is to make as much money as they can for their investors
• They’re not a singular example, they’re just doing their job
• If CEOs & drug companies don’t maximize their profits
• They’ll get fired & replaced by people who do so
• Big Pharma is responsible for a lot of bad things in American Health Care
• We need guardrails that ensure that they can only make profit if they’re serving the public welfare
• Corporates in US are doing what they’re allowed to do
• Life expectancy in the US now is what was in other wealthy countries in 1987
• We lead in making money on biotech innovation

Hospital Journey [34.50] to [39.01]

[40.01] Journals

• Major parts of journals incomes come from the journals selling reprints of those articles they publish
• Drug companies can give them to their sales reps to use as marketing tools
• What they’ve done is they’ve submitted their manuscript without data
• Information Laundering: Says it’s peer reviewed
• Lancet made 41% of its revenues from selling reprints to drug companies
• In 2008 the average annual cost of new drug was twenty-one hundred and fifteen dollars
• In 2021 the cost was hundred-eighty and thousand dollars
• In 2022 it was two hundred & fifty thousand dollars
• Pfizer had been fined the largest criminal fine in U.S history for any matter
• Fine was 1.195 billion dollars

[53.39] Mainstream Media

• We’re the people who have to call it out with a louder voice pharmacies
• We won’t get change until the people have a stronger voice than the pharmaceutical lobbyists
• It’s political power and it’s an uphill battle
• Pharma is violating its social contracts
• Covid vacancies: FDA didn’t make drug companies release their data about side effects
• FDA didn’t require the drug companies to do randomized controlled trials
• I’m not exaggerating because I get my ass sued if I am.

What’s your most fervent desire?

I want to help people understand these problems and empower people with the information.

After completing a residency in Family Medicine and a 2-year Robert Wood Johnson fellowship, Dr. John Abramson practiced as a family physician for 20 years in a small town an hour north of Boston. He also served for 7 years as chair of the department of family practice at Lahey Clinic. He has been on the Harvard Medical School faculty since 1997, and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Health Care Policy.
In 2002, after becoming aware of the uncorrected misrepresentations about the benefits and dangers of Vioxx and Celebrex in our most respected medical journals, Dr. Abramson left his practice to devote his full attention to researching the quality of the information doctors must rely on. In September 2004 he published Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine. Just one week later, Vioxx was withdrawn in the biggest drug recall ever, but not before it had killed between 40 and 60,000 Americans, despite providing no better relief than inexpensive OTC anti-inflammatory drugs.