Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
worthwhile, 2 Oct 2008
Yes, it's somewhat repetitive but there's valuable information here, offered by a former Editor-in-Chief of The New England Journal of Medicine, considered the most prestigious medical journal in the world.
It's just a pity that the only readers of this book are likely to be the already-converted. Everyone should know this information, as well as that contained in similarly worthwhile books like Selling Sickness, Dirty Medicine, Racketeering In Medicine, The Great Cholesterol Con, Heart Frauds, How to Protect Your Heart from Your Doctor, Confessions of a Medical Heretic (amusingly written, by a medical doctor, as well as scandalous), The Medical Mafia (also by a medic, similar theme as Confessions and passionately but badly written), The Truth About Vaccines, Cancer: Why We're Still Dying to Know the Truth, The Cancer Industry, Cancer is Not a Disease, and Why We will Never Win the War on AIDS.
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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good, but repeats itself, 29 Mar 2006
By A Customer
This book certainly sheds light on unscrupulous aspects of the pharmaceutical industry. One of the recurring themes in the book is that Big Pharma spends a lot of money overloading all of us with why we should pay for their latest drugs. The idea is that if the drug companies say this enough times, we will be convinced to buy their products or our doctors will be convinced to prescribe these products. However, the author repeats herself so often in making this (and other) charges against the industry, she is equally guilty of trying to convert us into her point of view by repetition tactics. Does this book tell us about the short-comings of the pharmaceutical companies and the governmental regulatory bodies? Yes. Does the author need 319 pages to get this point across to the reader? No. Buy it if you want an easy read that exposes a lot of dirt, but turn a blind eye towards the kind of sensationalistic writing used to make this book so hard to put down.
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7 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Eye opener, 1 Feb 2006
Everyone should read this book, really. It's not only an eye opener but it's an excellent reading too.The author has all the credentials and brings full credibility to the work, furthermore the book is written in such a way that you sometimes forget you're reading a factual report of the state of the pharmaceutical industry -- it feels more like a good Dan Brown or John Grisham novel, the difference being is all true. And scary. I suppose the situation in America is even worse than here in Europe (at least we have the solace of drug price control over here) but to learn what goes behind the secretive doors of big pharma companies is most of the time astonishing and left me outraged after reading some passages. Michael Moore must pick up this book and write one of those wonderful documentaries since big pharma has all the ingredients to a blockbuster, Oscar-winning Moore documentary -- think of everything that is wrong with the big corporations and their absurd profits and practices: it's all there in the big pharmaceutical companies and Marcia Angells's wonderful book. Read it. Spread the word. And let's try and convice Mr. Moore to produce a film about it.
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