Rethinking Medications

“A masterful assessment of a highly flawed health care system.”–Kirkus“This eye-opening look at the pharmaceutical industry should make FDA officials want to scrutinize drug approvals more carefully, doctors want to prescribe more carefully, and patients want to consume more carefully.”–Booklist“A damning survey of the drug development system’s many failures, this enlightens even as it infuriates.”–Publishers Weekly“Rethinking Medications gives us the historical and recent lessons we need to move forward with smarter solutions for the U.S. healthcare industry.”–Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, drug cost innovator, and former Shark Tank principal.“Rethinking Medications offers a rare combination of deep knowledge, common sense, and an engaging style; Avorn’s account of pharma’s achievements and scandals is simultaneously illuminating and infuriating. Americans have been paying too much for drugs and too little attention to the ways we could improve drug policy. This book is a guide to how we could be a healthier nation at a more affordable cost.”–Paul Starr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine

Jerry Avorn, MD, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior internist in the Mass General Brigham health-care system. He built a leading research center at Harvard to study medication use, outcomes, costs, and policies and developed the educational outreach approach known as “academic detailing,” providing evidence-based information about medications to prescribers. One of the nation’s most highly cited researchers, Dr. Avorn is the author of Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs, and he has written or cowritten over six hundred papers in the medical literature as well as opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, JAMA, and The New England Journal of Medicine.