Books › Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, and How We Can Fix it
Bad Pharma: How Medicine is Broken, and How We Can Fix it
456 pages
A meticulously researched, infuriatingly compelling teardown of the medical-industrial complex that will permanently alter how you view a prescription pad.
What it feels like
Reading this book feels like sitting down with a brilliant, deeply frustrated insider who is determined to show you the cracks in a foundation you thought was solid. The pace is brisk and urgent, driven by a relentless accumulation of evidence that transforms complex clinical trial data into a gripping, infuriating narrative. The mood is sobering but ultimately galvanizing, steeped in righteous indignation rather than despair. The prose is sharp, conversational, and fiercely logical, cutting through bureaucratic jargon to expose systemic rot with wry precision. It is a profoundly eye-opening experience designed for readers who crave rigorous investigative journalism and are willing to have their trust in institutional authority permanently dismantled in exchange for the unvarnished truth.
- Mood
- infuriating
- eye-opening
- sobering
- galvanizing
- Tone
- urgent
- indignant
- analytical
- wry
- authoritative
- Pace
- brisk
- Themes
- systemic corruption · the illusion of objectivity · profit over people · the power of data manipulation · institutional betrayal
- The writing
- Sharp, accessible, and relentlessly logical, translating complex statistical and medical jargon into punchy, conversational arguments.
- The arc
- Moves from a shocking dismantling of trusted institutions to a state of righteous anger, culminating in a pragmatic call to action.
- Who it's for
- Readers who love rigorous, investigative non-fiction that challenges the status quo and exposes the hidden mechanics of everyday systems.
Content notes
- medical negligence
- corporate corruption
- discussion of illness and death
About the book
We like to imagine that medicine is based on evidence and the results of fair tests. In reality, those tests are often profoundly flawed. We like to imagine that doctors are familiar with the research literature about a drug, when in reality much of the research is hidden from them by drug companies. We like to imagine that doctors are impartially educated, when in reality much of their education is funded by the pharmaceutical industry. We like to imagine that regulators let only effective drugs onto the market, when in reality they approve useless drugs, with data on side effects casually withheld from doctors and patients. All these problems have been shielded from public scrutiny because they're too complex to capture in a sound bite. But Ben Goldacre shows that the true scale of this murderous disaster fully reveals itself only when the details are untangled. He believes we should all be able to understand precisely how data manipulation works and how research misconduct on a global scale affects us. This book reveals a shockingly broken system and calls for something to be done.--From publisher description.
Description from Open Library.
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