I am a medical thriller author who, during a brief stint in residency after medical school, saw up close what the world of medicine is really like, from the level of the patient at the bedside to the industrial level with big corporate players such as pharmaceutical and health insurance companies. I am in a position to curate what books can inform the general public about such topics.
I have always known that problems can potentially occur with pharmaceutical drugs, even when regulations are in place. But when there is a black market for dangerous counterfeit versions of those drugs, the risk to patient safety skyrockets.
I liked how this book opened my eyes to this global phenomenon that is more common than one might think.
Long the scourge of developing countries, fake pills are now increasingly common in the United States. The explosion of Internet commerce, coupled with globalization and increased pharmaceutical use has led to an unprecedented vulnerability in the U.S. drug supply. Today, an estimated 80% of our drugs are manufactured overseas, mostly in India and China. Every link along this supply chain offers an opportunity for counterfeiters, and increasingly, they are breaking in. In 2008, fake doses of the blood thinner Heparin killed 81 people worldwide and resulted in hundreds of severe allergic reactions in the United States. In 2012, a counterfeit…
There is a reason that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration exists: the pre-FDA era of medicine was the Wild West of healing.
As someone who already had some understanding of the FDA’s processes, this book expanded on that knowledge. At the same time, I appreciated how this book can be a breathtaking introduction to the FDA with no prior knowledge of it.
How the FDA was shaped by public health crises and patient advocacy, told against a background of the contentious hearings on the breast cancer drug Avastin.
Food and Drug Administration approval for COVID-19 vaccines and the controversial Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm made headlines, but few of us know much about how the agency does its work. Why is the FDA the ultimate US authority on a drug’s safety and efficacy? In Drugs and the FDA, Mikkael Sekeres—a leading oncologist and former chair of the FDA’s cancer drug advisory committee—tells the story of how the FDA became the most trusted regulatory agency…
What were America's first prisons like? How did penal reformers, prison administrators, and politicians deal with the challenges of confining human beings in long-term captivity as punishment--what they saw as a humane intervention?
The Deviant Prison centers on one early prison: Eastern State Penitentiary. Built in Philadelphia, one of the…
If you already dislike the pharmaceutical industry for whatever reason, this book could certainly make your blood boil further.
In an effort to get a diverse perspective on Big Pharma, I made sure to check out a book with a contrary opinion, and this one fit the bill. I came away with a greater awareness of the industry’s impacts that are widespread globally, not locally.
In Pharmanomics, investigative journalist Nick Dearden digs down into the way we produce our medicines and finds that Big Pharma is failing us, with catastrophic consequences.
Big Pharma is more interested in profit than health. This was made clear as governments rushed to produce vaccines during the Covid pandemic. Behind the much-trumpeted scientific breakthroughs, major companies found new ways of gouging billions from governments in the West while abandoning the Global South. But this is only the latest episode in a long history of financialising medicine - from Purdue's rapacious marketing of highly addictive…
Pharmaceutical drugs are not just about brand-name products with corporate exclusivity over them. There’s also the world of generic drugs, with multiple companies manufacturing the same drug, and even that part of the industry can have hidden dangers.
Besides this eye-opener about generic drugs, the book provides a focus on the efforts of one person investigating shady generic drug companies, providing the mild feel of a detective novel.
Kirkus Reviews Best Health and Science Books of 2019
Science Friday Best Books of 2019
New postscript by the author
From an award-winning journalist, an explosive narrative investigation of the generic drug boom that reveals fraud and life-threatening dangers on a global scale—The Jungle for pharmaceuticals
Many have hailed the widespread use of generic drugs as one of the most important public-health developments of the twenty-first century. Today, almost 90 percent of our pharmaceutical market is comprised of generics,…
History has always celebrated the "Founding Fathers, ” yet we almost never hear of the courageous, resourceful women whose actions shaped the nation.
In Obstinate Daughters, New York Times bestselling author Denise Kiernan asserts that, “If storytellers now, in the present day, continue to exclude these lives, experiences, and…
When dishonest companies are willing to cut corners for profit, they are essentially akin to criminal organizations.
This book explores such an example with one particular drug startup company. I liked getting a front-row seat for looking at the great lengths that corporate crooks would go for profit.
It provides another unique perspective on the pharma industry, nicely complementing the other pharma books in this list of mine.
'A tour de force' - Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Empire of Pain
From the doctor's office to the opioid crisis, The Hard Sell is the story of a pharmaceutical company that got Americans hooked on fentanyl - and how it was finally held to account. Now a Netflix Original Movie, Pain Hustlers, starring Emily Blunt and Chris Evans.
In the early 2000s, John Kapoor had already amassed a small fortune in pharmaceuticals when he founded Insys Therapeutics. A boom time for painkillers, he had developed a novel formulation of fentanyl, the most potent opioid on the market.
Two medical mysteries force Dr. Mark Lin to confront not one but two industries of medicine: herbaceutical and pharmaceutical. A young man suffers from debilitating kidney failure while using a mysterious herbal product for weight loss. Another patient has trouble breathing for unclear reasons, though it could be from the anti-obesity drug he started taking.
Things get nightmarish when one of those pills strikes with lethal force, compelling Mark to take action and navigate a web of deceit. He will uncover secrets about these so-called miracle cures, confront a company spokesman, and face a pair of aggressive salespeople. But once he puts everything on the line and discovers the true conspiracy, his only mission is to prevent catastrophic death, for the public and for himself.
No Color is My Kind tells the stories of the desegregation of Houston, TX, in 1960, the life of civil rights leader Eldrewey Stearns, and the author's relationship to Stearns.
They met in a psychiatric case conference while Stearns was hospitalized at the University of Texas Medical Branch. After his…
This is not an insect book--it is a history book, but one that tells the history you didn't learn in school, or it tells the history in a way you never imagined. Five insects had a significant impact on human history. Silkworm moth, Oriental rat flea, human body louse, yellow…
