Why You Are Paying 20,000% More for Less Effective Prescription Drugs with Dr. John Abramson

Dr. John Abramson is a physician who is a clinical faculty member at Harvard Medical School. His areas of expertise include public health policy, and he has a special interest in the pharmaceutical industry in America. He has authored two books on this subject, with his most recent title, 'Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It,' published in 2022. He is also an expert in national litigation with respect to the drug industry.

In this astonishing episode, Dr. Abramson reveals how the pharmaceutical industry skews data to mislead not the American public, doctors, and the rest of the medical industry. He details how pharmaceutical companies control the narrative by funding research, owning the data, and using powerful marketing strategies. These efforts create an institutionalized bias towards pricey drugs, which in some cases are 200 times more expensive than alternatives that are equally as effective.  

Whether you're an employer, medical professional, or an American resident, prepare to be shocked at how drug companies have gradually taken control of the systems and institutions that are meant to regulate the pharmaceutical industry and protect Americans. 

"80% of the American public think that drugs cost too much, and that drug companies are primarily interested in their own profits, and yet there's this hope that medical innovation will provide us with therapies that are previously unavailable and that our future good health is going to be dependent on the pharmaceutical companies' innovation, rather than the way we live our lives." 

"The primary job of the pharmaceutical industry, regardless of what they try to tell us, is to maximize their revenues and returns those revenues to their shareholders. It's not to make us healthier. They spend a lot of money trying to convince us that it's to make us healthier, but it's not their primary job." 

"All of the channels that provide healthcare information, be it to doctors, or the public, or purchasers, almost all of the information about pharmaceuticals comes from the drug industry itself."

"In terms of the universe of knowledge that doctors receive from new research, 96% of that knowledge is about drugs and devices. It's not about how to make Americans healthier. Less than 4% of the money we spend on research is about how to make Americans healthy." 

"The information that is generated by the drug companies, who pay for about 86% of clinical trials, is used as marketing material, but the doctors don't understand this. The doctors think they are practicing evidence-based medicine."