Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profesion, and the Pharmaceutical Industry [Hardcover]

Howard Brody (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0742552187 | ISBN-13: 978-0742552180 | Publication Date: December 1, 2006 | Edition: 1

For decades, medical professionals have betrayed the public's trust by accepting various benefits from the pharmaceutical industry. Both drug company representatives and doctors employ artful spin to portray this behavior positively to the public, and to themselves. In Hooked, Howard Brody argues that we can neither understand the problem, nor propose helpful solutions until we identify the many levels of activity connecting these purportedly noble industries. We can pass laws and enact regulations, but ultimately the medical profession must take responsibility for its own integrity. Hooked is a wake-up call for anyone expecting high quality, ethical medical care.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Thoroughly documented, logically structured, and well written, [Brody's] book offers a good starting point for discussing ethical issues that impact us all. Recommended for all medical and public libraries. (Library Journal )

The single best, most balanced, most comprehensive guide to the current difficulties with the pharmaceutical industry that I have ever read. (Carl Elliott )

Physicians, policy makers, and the public should thank Dr. Brody for this major contribution to our understanding of the medical profession and the corrupting influence on the profession of its complex relationship with the pharmaceutical industry. (Philip R. Lee, MD )

[Brody] aims for the measured cadences of the ethicist . . . calmly laying out the relevant facts and then reasoning from basic principles to determine whether the medicine-pharmaceutical relationship, as it stands now, is an ethical one or not. That Dr. Brody manages to deliver a hundred-odd pages of determinedly objective analysis before he, too, lets the righteous indignation roll should not really be called a failure of methodology: even as he carefully lays out the facts in this impressively comprehensive book, those facts begin to speak damningly for themselves . . . for a detailed overview of this very jagged terrain, if not for a map of the pathway out, a better general guide than this one is hard to imagine. (The New York Times )

In this extraordinary book, Dr. Howard Brody, a medical ethicist, lays out in great detail what he judges to be Big Pharma's misdeeds and the seduction of U.S. docs. His targets are the influence of company drug reps, the suppression of negative research data, the abuse of patents, phony advertising and weak oversight by the FDA. (Chicago Tribune Magazine )

I highly acclaim and recommend this book to all physicians, medical students, and those in policy-making positions regarding our broken health-care system...It ought to be required reading for the medical profession as a whole and a call to action to help us regain the public's trust in our integrity, altruism, and professional ethics. (Explore )

Dr. Howard Brody has written a powerful book that is relevant to all out practices and questions the relationship between medicine and the pharmaceutical industry. (The Journal Of Nuclear Medicine, December 1, 2008 )

It seems that no stone is left unturned in this 367-page book, which can feel at times overwhelming but is without a doubt, thorough. (Health Affairs, September 2008 )

This book is useful for any medical student or resident who, like me, finds the practice of distributing free pens and lunches a nice perk but an ineffective marketing strategy. Hooked is surely worthwhile for the academic physician-investigator who struggles to win grants, or for the rural practitioner. (Anesthesia and Analgesia, September 2008 )

This book is useful for any medical student or resident who, like me, finds the practice of distributing free pens and lunches a nice perk but an ineffective marketing strategy. Hooked is surely worthwhile for the academic physician-investigator who struggles to win grants, or for the rural practitioner. (Anesthesia and Analgesia, September 2008 )

The densely written book captures one's attention and reads like a nonfiction thriller....I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to gain a thorough understanding of the relationship between the pharmaceutical industry and the medical profession. This knowledge provides a platform for the development of rational solutions, which are sorely needed. (Journal Of The American Medical Association, (Jama) )

Hooked is a detailed analysis of the relationship between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry primarily in the United States. Hooked is well researched and well written. Brody's style is fluent, helping make his arguments persuasive. (Thomas Harter Journal Of Value Inquiry )

Hooked is a detailed analysis of the relationship between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry primarily in the United States. Hooked is well researched and well written. Brody's style is fluent, helping make his arguments persuasive. (Thomas Harter Journal Of Value Inquiry )

We still have too many doctors and patients who may be aware of some of the deviances of the pharmaceutical industry, however, consider these to be exceptional and of marginal importance. In fact, if someone reads Brody's book, they will learn that fraud, malpractice, and lying is an inbuilt phenomenon in the system of clinical research, drug regulation, scientific publication, medical training and drug advertisements. What Brody adds to our present knowledge is a systematic collection of recommendations for changing the present malfunctioning status quo. It is good to read Brody's book, and it is good to have his reflections in our minds. (Imre Szebik Metapsychology Online Reviews, July 7, 2009 )

An extremely timely book, recommended. (Pediatric Endocrinology Reviews, (Per) )

About the Author

Howard Brody is professor and director for the Institute for the Medical Humanities, University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Prior to this appointment, Dr. Brody was University Distinguished Professor of family practice, and philosophy at Michigan State University, where he also sat on the faculty of the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences; he served as director of the Center from 1985-2000. Dr. Brody completed his residency in family practice at the University of Virginia Medical Center. He received his MD from the College of Human Medicine, Michigan State University, in 1976, and his PhD in Philosophy, also from Michigan State University, in 1977. He currently sits on the board of the American Society for Bioethics and the Humanities, and specializes in ethics and the doctor-patient relationship. He has authored five books, among them Stories of Sickness (2002) and The Placebo Response: How You Can Release the Body's Inner Pharmacy for Better Health (2000). For up-to-date news about the issues covered in Hooked, visit Dr. Brody's new blog.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 382 pages
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers; 1 edition (December 1, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0742552187
• ISBN-13: 978-0742552180
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #925,305 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars from The NYTimes- April 24, 2007, April 24, 2007

By 

Leif (Seattle, WA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profesion, and the Pharmaceutical Industry (Hardcover)

from The NYTimes- April 24, 2007

Medicine and the Drug Industry, a Morality Tale
By ABIGAIL ZUGER, M.D.

It was in 1949 that Elvin Stakman, president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, issued the membership their marching orders: "Science cannot stop while ethics catches up."

And sure enough, from bombs to clones, the ethicists have generally kept to the rear of the scientific parade: they are the ones with the big brooms trying to restore order after the floats and the elephants go by.

Those brooms sweep slowly. Often, by the time the ethicists finish laying out facts and weighing relevant moral values, the worst of any given crisis has passed. But recently, those who work in medicine have moved closer to the fray: they staff acute-care hospitals and monitor events in real time, aiming for a little less retrospective philosophy and a little more damage control.

In this proactive spirit Howard Brody, a medical ethicist, has brought his discipline's tools to the relationship between the medical profession and the pharmaceutical industry. This problematic tangle of moral compromise (or triumphant health-promoting collaboration, depending on your point of view) has inspired several polemics by physicians in recent years, all of them straightforward indictments of the pharmaceutical industry and its for-profit webs.

Dr. Brody is also a physician, but he aims for the measured cadences of the ethicist instead, calmly laying out the relevant facts and then reasoning from basic principles to determine whether the medicine-pharmaceutical relationship, as it stands now, is an ethical one or not.

That Dr. Brody manages to deliver a hundred-odd pages of determinedly objective analysis before he, too, lets the righteous indignation roll should not really be called a failure of methodology: even as he carefully lays out the facts in this impressively comprehensive book, those facts begin to speak damningly for themselves.

The small-time operations that grew up into modern medicine and Big Pharma joined together back in the late 19th century, allied in the name of scientific medicine against a variety of dubious health-care entrepreneurs. The A.M.A. actually called the early pharmaceutical companies the "ethical" drug makers, to distinguish them from unscrupulous patent-medicine peddlers.

Over time, this casual alliance has been reinforced with such complex and often invisible bonds that, in Dr. Brody's title metaphor, medicine and pharma are now "hooked" like two pieces of Velcro, tethered by a million barbs and as dependent on each other as any addicts are on their substance of choice.

Dr. Brody systematically analyzes the levels of connection, from the lowly drug salesman buying lunch for a roomful of medical students (future customers all) to the lucrative contracts and patents that simultaneously fuel medical research, fill corporate coffers and give us, as the industry doggedly and quite correctly points out, dozens of truly miraculous life-saving drugs.

Many of these interactions are probably now familiar to most readers: the omnipresent logo-bearing trinkets festooning medical offices, the free samples of the latest, most expensive drugs, the "ask your doctor" television ads.

Less familiar may be some of industry's other friendly overtures: the lavish junkets and cash rewards for some "high-prescribing" doctors; the subtle manipulations of research data; the way-too-generous financing of postgraduate medical education; the very cozy relationship with the Food and Drug Administration and its physician consultants; and a casually Orwellian interference with the average physician's prescription pad.

A drug salesman recalls for Dr. Brody the time his company asked a local doctor to evaluate various sales presentations for a particular drug: "He'd been selected because our data showed that he was a relatively low prescriber. ...Basically, the company was willing to bet $500 or $750 that if he heard the same drug pitch all day, by the end of the day he'd be so brainwashed that he could not possibly prescribe any other drug but ours."

All this mutual back-scratching would be fine if patients' interests were indeed being served. But ample data indicates quite the reverse. Patients, after all, are the ones who pay for expensive drugs when cheaper would do as well, and the ones who swallow dangerous drugs nudged to market by their manufacturers.

Many individual problematic drugs make an appearance here. Chloromycetin, a toxic antibiotic from the 1950s, was relentlessly promoted by its manufacturer for routine use until the day its patent expired. (Still available in generic form, it is now used only as a last resort.) Thalidomide never caused an epidemic of birth defects in this country, as it did in Germany, only because a single stubborn F.D.A. officer was dissatisfied with the drug's safety profile, despite the manufacturer's repeated assurances that everything was fine.

The epitaph of the recently withdrawn painkiller Vioxx, whose virtues were subtly spun to the medical community in prestigious research journals, is still being written in litigation around the country.

"Research that is driven by marketing rather than by scientific aims would seem, in the end, to be low-quality research," Dr. Brody comments mildly about the Vioxx fiasco.

His overall conclusion is similarly low-key: "A profession is not just a way of making money; it's a form of public trust. ...Medicine has for many decades now been betraying this public trust."

It is not a particularly surprising conclusion, and, in fact, there is relatively little in this book to surprise anyone familiar with the territory. Rather than new material, it provides a meticulously referenced compendium of all the relevant history and commentary (including, for full disclosure, excerpts from one of this reviewer's columns in this newspaper).

Its breadth translates into a lack of depth in some areas, especially the final section, in which Dr. Brody tries to outline a feasible solution to the mess. His suggestions are cogent but a little skimpy, given that absent an act of God, it will probably take an act of Congress to pry medicine and industry apart someday, preferably as part of thoroughgoing health care reform.

Still, for a detailed overview of this very jagged terrain, if not for a map of the pathway out, a better general guide than this one is hard to imagine.

Abigail Zuger, a regular contributor, is a physician in Manhattan.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hooked Is A Good Read Even For Guys Like Me, February 17, 2008

By 

Paul Barkley (Washington DC Metro Area) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profesion, and the Pharmaceutical Industry (Hardcover)

The kind of book I normally like has lots of car chases, gun fights, and amusing dialog as the good guys and bad guys struggle. This book opens with an amusing "Car Talk" anecdote, but sadly has no gun fights. What it does have is the bizarre and fascinating story of the way the pharmaceutical companies have gotten in bed with the medical establishment. Dr. Brody is a medical ethicist, and he paints a very balanced picture of what's happened since the establishment of "ethical" drugs. I assume if you're academically inclined, you'll be convinced by the evidence presented. It's exhaustive. If you're like me, however, what you really want is an entertaining read that tells you something you really ought to know, mainly that a lot of medical research is profit-driven crap, and that many physicians are prescribing expensive name brand drugs because they're being influenced, although they claim not to be, by their drug reps, or they're simply giving in to patients who have seen an ad on TV for a miracle pill.

Although the book for 15 chapters carefully builds the case against the current cozy arrangement between the drug companies and the medical profession, it does so not only in a rigorous manner, but more importantly to readers like me, it sprinkles the chapters with real cases, including dialog from real people that will definitely get your attention. Before the table of contents, the lead quote from a drug company president sets the tone: "If we put horse manure in a capsule, we could sell it to 95% of these doctors." And there are plenty more outrageous statements made by real people.

Here's my disclaimer. I knew Dr. Brody as an undergraduate many years ago and I was curious about what he was doing and about this book. I probably wouldn't have purchased it otherwise because I read almost no non-fiction, except work related technical material, far from the medical profession. I don't know any more about drugs and medicine than the next person, although I have been bothered in the past when I signed in at the doctor's office, using a clipboard with a prominent drug displayed on it, and then been prescribed that same drug a half hour later. But I do read the paper, and over the years there have been an awful lot of drug scandals, enough to make you wonder what's going on. A few months ago Merck agreed to pay $4.85 billion to settle thousands of cases of heart attacks and strokes brought on by their painkiller, Vioxx. And a few days after reading the book, Merck agreed to pay $671 million for overcharging government health programs for 4 of their popular drugs, including Vioxx and Pepcid, when it was still a prescription drug. And this is just one drug company. The book lists many examples, sprinkling them in the chapters like short stories from hell.

The odds are you've probably taken some of these drugs before. Although suspicious of whether this book was worth my time, in the first chapter I was "hooked" when I read about Claritin, a very common antihistamine that I've taken in the past, and its shady history. Like a good mystery, I won't spoil the story by explaining what happened with Claritin, but if you've ever taken it, you should read how marketing triumphed over science.

There are a few places in the book where, by necessity, it bogs down a little in setting the next stage for the extended academic treatise that it is. Chapter 2 was the low point for me, but after a few examples in chapter one I already had an idea that the rest of the book would be more entertaining, an admittedly shallow view. In fact after that the book keeps building outrageous case after case, and letting the facts speak for themselves. In this day and age of hype, both political and marketing, it's hard to read something that is balanced when the conclusion you're being led to is incontrovertible.

So, if you want to learn more about the subject, this is an entertaining book, albeit one that makes some very important points. And if you're a member of the medical or pharmaceutical establishments and you're reading this because it affects your livelihood, then you have all the endnotes and citations that you'd ever need, and I'm pretty sure that Dr. Brody makes his case convincingly. I can guarantee you that I didn't stop to look up any of the endnotes while reading the book, and I was even a little put off that every chapter had pages of them at the end, but I must admit I couldn't help peeking at some of the longer ones when I found they contained interesting mini-stories in their own right. So for the rest of us who need a break from Clancy and Grisham, and yet want to be entertained as well as informed, I'd highly recommend "Hooked".

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent expose of corruption within the medical pharmaceutical complex, August 26, 2011

By 

J. Douglas Bremner (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Hooked: Ethics, the Medical Profesion, and the Pharmaceutical Industry (Hardcover)

Dr Brody does a great job of outlining the many multifarious ways that the pharmaceutical industry and device makers have infiltrated academic medicine and coopted them from their own quest for profits. Money has an insidious way of corrupting people and he shows that academic doctors are not immune. The cover up just meant that you need an astute researcher like himself to follow the trail of deceipt and money. Hat's off to him.

Doug Bremner MD, author of:

The Goose That Laid The Golden Egg