Overview

For millennia, human survival depended on our innate abilities to fight pathogens and repair injuries. Only recently has medical science prolonged longevity and improved quality of life. Physicians and academic researchers contribute to such progress, but the principal contributor is private industry that produces the tools – drugs and medical devices – enabling doctors to prevent and cure disease. Heavy regulation and biology’s complexity and unpredictability make medical innovation extremely difficult and expensive. Pharmaphobia describes how an ideological crusade, stretching over the last quarter century, has used distortion and flawed logic to make medical innovation even harder in a misguided pursuit of theoretical professional purity. Bureaucrats, reporters, politicians, and predatory lawyers have built careers attacking the medical products industry, belittling its critical contributions to medical innovation and accusing it of non-existent malfeasance: overselling product value, flaunting safety and corrupting physicians and academics who partner with it. The mania has imposed “conflict-of-interest” regulations limiting or banning valuable interactions between industry and physicians and researchers and diverting scarce resources from innovation to compliance. The victims are patients suffering from cancer, dementia, and other serious diseases for which new treatments are delayed, reduced, or eliminated as a result of these pointless regulations. With breathtaking detail, Thomas Stossel shows how this attack on doctors who work with industry limits medical innovation and inhibits the process of bringing new products into medical care.

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9781442244627

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Reviews

When it comes to medical academics, Tom Stossel has suffered the slings and arrows of the so-called healthcare elite -- and he's not going to take it anymore! Pharmaphobia is a blunt, honest, smart, frightening, and unvarnished look at why we need to stop thinking in terms of good guys and bad guys and start thinking about allies and partners. It's the only way to save American healthcare. -- Peter J. Pitts, Former FDA Associate Commissioner; President, Center for Medicine in the Public Interest A distinguished Harvard hematologist and basic researcher, Tom Stossel is passionately interested in ensuring that scientific progress is translated into tangible benefit for patients. Stossel's focus is on real-world impact; he is acutely aware of the many challenges associated with transforming a nascent idea into a clinical advance, and recognizes the pivotal role industry can play in catalyzing and driving this difficult process. In Pharmaphobia, Stossel embraces a nuanced and integrative vision that values both innovative science and market forces. Patients are fortunate to have a determined and relentless clinical champion like Tom Stossel in their corner. -- David A. Shaywitz, MD, PhD, Chief Medical Officer, DNAnexus, and Co-Founder and West Coast Innovation Lead, MGH/MIT Center for Assessment Technology and Continuous Health (CATCH) At last, someone willing to challenge the Zeitgeist. In Pharmaphobia, Tom Stossel shines an uncomfortable light on a world where transparency has morphed into bias. Stossel makes clear how America's obsession with hidden motives and imagined conspiracies has deprived us of the kind of advice and products that could save our lives. -- Paul A. Offit M.D., MD, Professor of Pediatrics, The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia

Author Information

Thomas P. Stossel, M.D., is a hematologist and medical researcher at Boston’s Brigham & Women’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, where he is the American Cancer Society Professor of Medicine. He has authored more than 290 publications and two textbooks, and is an inventor on 11 issued patents. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences, the founder and scientific director of two biotechnology start-up companies, a cofounder - along with his wife Kerry Maguire, D.D.S., M.S.P.H. and others - of the medical outreach organization Options for Children in Zambia, and a Visiting Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

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