Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.),   ISBN:9780061344763

Customer Rating: 

John Abramson is a family medicine physician who has headed that division of the Lahey Clinic; spent two years as a Robert Wood Johnson fellow studying research design, statistics, epidemiology and health policy; studied and developed HMO's; and served on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School. In this book he examines the modern development and marketing of pharmaceuticals.





Many topics are covered in detail including: anti-inflammatory drugs, hormone replacement therapy, and drugs for treating osteoporosis, depression, diabetes, and high cholesterol. He offers his analysis of what research shows to be the correct guidelines for use of these drugs and his recommendations for American health care policy.





This book stands along side THE CHINA STUDY and the first books of McDougall, Fuhrman, Ornish, Barnard and Esselstyn as a must read. All in the health care profession or who are taking a modern pharmaceutical agent should read it.

Customer Rating: 

wonderful book. very well written. should be read by everyone. the pharmaceutical industry is helping to destroy this country and we all will be paying for this for a long time to come. hopefully the criminals who are running these companies will be made to pay the most.

Customer Rating: 

Absolutely one of the most informative books I've ever read. I'm only on page 30 but I have skimmed through the whole book. What a wealth of valuable information! This book is worth MANY times it's price. I also have Dr. Abramson's lectures on DVD. It's a disgrace that more doctors don't bother to do the investigative work (or don't care) to protect their patients, & instead, just act like puppets whose strings are in the hands of pharmaceutical companies. Months before reading "Overdosed America," when diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes, I already experienced exactly what is in this book with my first two doctors - "Here, take these pills & go away, I'm busy."

Customer Rating: 

As a 30-year paramedic, I have, sadly, experienced a front-row seat at our "drug-induced" societal circus, and I am here to say it is a gut-wrenching viewpoint. Physicians right out of school allow themselves to led by the shoat ring, by the most aggregious drug cartels on the planet. Follow the money,and boy, have they ever. Their inherent "Primum Non Nocere" vow nothing but a vague memory, they substitute disease care for health care and pocket the polyps.

This book fights the good fight, and thank heaven for those few like this author, who has the nerve to say, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it anymore."

Customer Rating: 

A few comments... Doctors always appeal to authority rather than to fact, scientific or otherwise. This is because doctors are NOT scientists. They have no scientific training (not to mention no training at all in nutrition). Some doctors may be doing science in a lab, or a clinical setting, but, in fact, what doctors are are presenters of fashionable medical dogma, whether science based or an ad for some pharmaceutical promising the fountain of youth. Most doctors, sadly, get the latest info in medicine from Newsweek. They don't even read their own rags...

People of my parents generation and even of my generation, I am 59, were taught to worship the 'doctor'. Way back when, there probably were a lot of good doctors, meaning good diagnosticians. Now doctors have become drug pushers of a very dangerous sort. I have no statistics to back this up, and it just occurred to me, but I would not be at all surprised to find out that doctors kill more people with their subtle poisons than are killed by street heroin. The very sad thing is that with television advertising of every kind of prescription drug, people go to the doctor and Demand to have it prescribed. I have two emergency room doctor friends who got out of private practice because they felt that they were being asked to do great harm, when that is a violation of the first precept of the Hippocratic oath. (First, do no harm.) At least in the ER they may be able to help and maybe even save lives.

It is possible to learn how two drugs interact with each other, it is impossible, clinically, to find out how three or more drugs interact. It is staggering the number of clinical participants that it would take to show that a drug soup is safe.

Most of the elderly people in my Mumma's apartment building take, literally, a handful of drugs, some of them very dangerous indeed. Coumadin is quite common here. Aspirin would be a far better, safer choice. (But there is no profit in aspirin when you can buy a lifetime supply for $1.98.) This will not surprise most children of these elderly parents. In some cases they encourage the practice, thinking (wrongly) that they are 'saving their parent'. So very wrong, so very, very wrong... So very, very sad.