Overdosed America

It's been a while since I wrote a book review. I had read Overdosed America by John Abramson before, but rereading it after cancer block has made it more salient. Directed at laypeople, this book argues that Americans are taking too many medications and doctors are prescribing too much because of undue influence by the pharmaceutical companies on medicine without proper independent regulatory agencies. He gives very specific examples like the often cited Vioxx/Celebrex (rofecoxib/celecoxib) drama and HRT. He does a decent job of explaining the construction and presentation of clinical studies to demonstrate how interpretation of data can be skewed to favor pharmaceutical companies (ie. using relative risk instead of absolute risk reduction). It actually made a lot of sense with epidemiology background. And I became pretty convinced that bias does creep into major studies published in journals like JAMA and NEJM. The book itself is okay. It's not groundbreaking or exceptionally written or anything. It does make a decent case, and it's pretty opinionated. But it might be worth looking at, if you're interested in the intersection between big pharma, academic medicine, and governmental regulation. It's stuff that all doctors should know, but a lot of it is presented in medical school anyway.