Over the last 30 years, there's been a rapid transformation in the way that knowledge is created in American medicine.... Two-thirds to three-quarters of the articles that appear in our most trusted journals are commercially sponsored, and we know that the odds are five times greater of commercially sponsored articles finding that the sponsor's drug is the treatment of choice compared to non-commercially sponsored studies of the same exact drug....
The evidence that drives our medicine grows in a direction towards corporate profits the way that plants grow towards sunlight. The problems are twofold.
Number one, the mechanisms of oversight of integrity of this commercially sponsored knowledge have been infiltrated by the drug industry itself, so the FDA and the universities and the researchers and the medical journals are all dependent on the drug company money. But the really important problem is that our knowledge is growing away from an epidemiologically balanced approach to health care. So now the US, the wealthiest country in the world, is spending twice as much as the average of the other 21 wealthiest countries on health care, and Americans live an average of 2.5 years less in good health than the average of the citizens in the 21 other countries.... We approach problems in the most lucrative ways, but not the most effective ways.
