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(Circulation. 2005;111:2552-2554.)
© 2005 American Heart Association, Inc.

Editorial

Dr Jerome Kassirer’s Book On The Take: How Medicine’s Complicity With Big Business Can Endanger Your Health

Worthy of Comment

Thomas J. Ryan, MD; Roman W. DeSanctis, MD

From the Evans Department of Medicine, Boston University School of Medicine (T.J.R.), and the Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School (R.W.D.), Boston, Mass.

Correspondence to Thomas J. Ryan, MD, Cardiovascular Center, Boston Medical Center, 88 E Newton St, C-822, Boston, MA 02118. E-mail thomas.ryan@bmc.org

Key Words: Editorials • trials, clinical • drug industry • ethics • conflict of interest

An extract of the first 250 words of the full text is provided, because this article has no abstract.

Dr Jerome Kassirer’s new book published for a general audience, On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity With Big Business Can Endanger Your Health, chronicles the kind, extent, and consequences of collaborations between the medical profession and industry.¹ Adopting the style of an investigative reporter, this highly respected former editor of The New England Journal of Medicine relates, within 213 highly readable pages, a litany of well-referenced examples demonstrating that pernicious financial conflicts of interest are rife in medicine today and threaten to undermine the integrity of the profession. Although many of the incidents recounted in the book are already matters of public record, their inclusion in a single volume provides some sobering and most unsettling food for thought.

Beginning in Chapter 1 with the innocent free gifts, free meals, and free education many doctors receive, Dr Kassirer takes the reader through 8 revealing chapters to demonstrate that "trinkets bloom into meals at fine restaurants, meals grow into speaking fees, speaking fees morph into ongoing consultations and membership on drug company advisory boards, positions that can command up to six figures a year." He raises the question "Has all this money floating around medicine created a pattern of corruption?" By all indications, his answer to this question appears to be a resounding yes, with which we agree. The vis-à-tergo for this perfidy is attributed to the massive expansion of the highly profitable drug, device, biomedical, and commercial educational industries. This dramatic growth began to occur just after increased federal . . . [Full Text of this Article]