Medical risks

Confessions of a Medical Heretic
-- by Dr. Robert Mendelsohn
First published in 1979, this exposé of the medical profession -- covering issues from unnecessary surgeries and prescribed drugs to preventive medicine and home births -- has become a classic.  The statistics may be outdated, but the message is timeless. As one Amazon.com review says: "I loved this book when it first came out in 1979, and I still love it today -- perhaps even more. The sad part is that, except for the fact that lots of the actual procedures, tests and drugs Dr. Mendelsohn wrote about in this book have changed, almost everything else seems to have remained the same." Order now from Amazon.com

On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health
-- by Jerome P. Kassirer
"Some physicians become known as whores." This is strong language in Kassirer's mostly temperate but tough look at how big business is corrupting medicine -- but according to Kassirer, one doctor's wife used the word "whore" to describe her husband's accepting high fees to promote medical products. Kassirer, former editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, notes the range of conflicts of interest between profit-centered business and people-centered medicine, such as the drug industry's huge expenditures (in the billions) for courting doctors to use their products, for recruiting physicians to tout their drugs or, more slyly, to present seemingly objective medical discussions that, on closer examination, do favor the company's product over others. Order now from Amazon.com

"Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients"
-- by Ray Moynihan, Alan Cassels
This accessible study about the collusion between medical science and the drug industry emphasizes how drug companies market their products by either redefining problems as diseases (like female sexual dysfunction) or redefining a condition to encompass a greater percentage of the population. Moynihan, a health journalist for the New England Journal of Medicine and the Lancet, and Cassels, a Canadian science writer, note, for instance, that eight of the nine specialists who wrote the 2004 federal guideline on high cholesterol, which substantially increased the number of people in that category, have multiple financial ties to drug manufacturers. Order now from Amazon.com

The Hundred-Year Lie: How to Protect Yourself from the Chemicals That Are Destroying Your Health
-- by Randall Fitzgerald
This provocative and frightening look at the synthetic chemicals used by the processed foods, pharmaceutical and chemical industries delivers an excellent, up-to-date summary of "what is really in our food, water, vitamins, prescription drugs, childhood vaccines, cosmetics, and in our homes." Former Wall Street Journal investigative journalist Fitzgerald (author of "Mugged by the State") takes aim at the belief that "lab-created synthetics are as benign as -- and more effective than -- naturally occurring foods and medicines." Order now from Amazon.com

The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It
-- by Marcia Angell
In what should serve as the Fast Food Nation of the drug industry, Angell, former editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, presents a searing indictment of "big pharma" as corrupt and corrupting: of Congress, through huge campaign contributions; of the FDA, which is funded in part by the very companies it oversees; and, perhaps most shocking, of members of the medical profession and its institutions. Angell delineates how the drug giants, such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca, pay physicians to prescribe their products with gifts, junkets and marketing programs disguised as "professional education." Order now from Amazon.com