Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
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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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
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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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
axe to grind, 2 Dec 2007
Dr. Angell seems to have a serious axe to grind in writing this book, but then again nearly everyone who writes a book has an axe to grind to some degree. She's right that the large drug companies have become heavily involved in marketing, their drugs are very highly priced in the United States, and they do produce many "me-too" drugs. To some degree, though, this is par for the course for any big company that is trying to protect its interests in a highly competitive market. It may be that the industry will behave like this indefinitely if no one intervenes, or it could be that after all of the "low hanging fruit" drugs, such as SSRIs, are created and their patents run their course, fewer big drug companies will be able to survive. We may be witnessing something like the end of the dotcom boom. In either case, Dr. Angell's book is well researched and loaded with facts and examples. It's probably good for everyone to hear her ideas. Author of Adjust Your Brain: A Practical Theory for Maximizing Mental Health.
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