On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health

by Jerome P. Kassirer

We all know that doctors accept gifts from drug companies, ranging from pens and coffee mugs to free vacations at luxurious resorts. But as the former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine reveals in this shocking expose, these innocuous-seeming gifts are just the tip of an iceberg that is distorting the practice of medicine and jeopardizing the health of millions of Americans today.
In On the Take , Dr. Jerome Kassirer offers an unsettling look at the pervasive payoffs that physicians take from big drug companies and other medical suppliers, arguing that the billion-dollar onslaught of industry money has deflected many physicians' moral compasses and directly impacted the everyday care we receive from the doctors and institutions we trust most. Underscored by countless chilling untold stories, the book illuminates the financial connections between the wealthy companies that make drugs and the doctors who prescribe them. Kassirer details the shocking extent of these financial enticements and explains how they encourage bias, promote dangerously misleading medical information, raise the cost of medical care, and breed distrust.
A brilliant diagnosis of an epidemic of greed, On the Take offers insight into how we can cure the medical profession and restore our trust in doctors and hospitals.

Genres: Medicine, Nonfiction

272 pages, Paperback

First published October 18, 2004

Reviews

[Ietrio · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the low intellectual level required to pass the Government licensing schemes and be ready to kill people. All Kassirer needed was ambition to rote learn the textbooks and a wealthy enough family to pay for all the tolls spread along the path to licensing.

Which does not mean what he is saying here is wrong. Only that he takes his limited observations and goes.

Medicine is not a person. In Kassirer's World View powerful gods fight equally powerful wizards. And he will probably need to live though another life to see that what he calls ”Big Business” is the Government he is expecting to act as a Nanny. Worse, some documentation beyond his shallow observations would point out the situation is precisely generated by the actions of the same Savior Government.

In a way Kassirer is the precise exemplification of the things to which he calls the reader's attention. Shallow. Anecdote as data. Gossip. Generous quotes from the ad flyer. And Government statistics.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author of this book is/was an MD and Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. In it he identifies the issues, explains the processes and in the final two pages outlines suggested corrections. He is very precise about how and why these problems occur and why the continue. The most shocking problems was when someone writes and gets published in an accepted journal and the article is negative about a medication or medical apparatus, advertising from the identified company begins ...more The author of this book is/was an MD and Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine. In it he identifies the issues, explains the processes and in the final two pages outlines suggested corrections. He is very precise about how and why these problems occur and why the continue. The most shocking problems was when someone writes and gets published in an accepted journal and the article is negative about a medication or medical apparatus, advertising from the identified company begins to dry up. It seems the medical community wants "happy talk" about their products or they punish the ney sayers.
It is a very slow read but worth the information once you push through it.

[Psipsipsi · Rating 4 out of 5]

To us outsiders US health care is seen as corrupt and wasteful. Transparency International warned a few years ago that US gangsters were giving up drug smuggling for health care fraud as it was more profitable and it was rare to be caught. This excellent book by a well respected senior doctor describes the how and the why of the doctor-led part of the corruption. I had braced myself to be shocked - but not enough. Some of the crimes carried out by doctors were heinous, but in the US were not even seen as crimes, more like forgiveable peccadilloes. Seems a bit like the recent subprime shenanigans. Even though doctors were exposed running multimillion dollar criminal enterprises there was no punishment meted out. The gangsters seem to have got it right.

[Grace]

didn't finish...too similar to "the truth about drug companies" and with a smaller scope. (truth about drug companies talks about corruption of drug industry and how that trickles down to government, doctors, and so on whereas this book discusses doctors only). points are too focused?

[Christina]

it's a very, very slow read. But it's very interesting about the kick backs that medical professionals get. It's a scary thought.

[LWDC · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another book talking about the conflict of interests between what is in your best interests as a patient and in the doctors best interests as a benefactor of pharma perks...