Read & Comment
Read, Research, and React to Rethinking Medications
Dr. Jerry Avorn’s latest book reveals how America’s drug evaluation process has become compromised, with the FDA lowering approval standards under pharmaceutical industry pressure. Drawing on decades of Harvard Medical School research, Dr. Avorn examines how high prescription prices, industry lobbying, and revenue-driven healthcare affect medication safety and accessibility.
Through compelling clinical examples—from cancer treatments to psychedelics—he offers practical solutions for consumers, policymakers, and practitioners to ensure medications are effective, safe, and affordable.
With the resources on the page, you can download Chapter 1 of the book, download the book’s Notes section as a companion piece, and comment on the book and the topics covered.
"Jerry Avorn is a leading academic force in assessing safety and efficacy of prescription drugs, in many ways serving as the conscience for the pharma industry. In Rethinking Medications, he provides a systematic and up-to-date interrogation that will be useful for patients."
— Eric Topol, MD,
Executive Vice President, Scripps Research Institute, and author of Deep Medicine and The Patient Will See You Now
"With admirable clarity and vivid examples, noted medical researcher Jerry Avorn takes a bracing multidisciplinary approach to raising and deftly answering every question you have—as well as many that may not have occurred to you—about the vital role of prescription drugs in all our lives."
— Howard Gardner,
author of Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences and Hobbs Professor of Cognition, Harvard University
Start reading now with a PDF of Chapter 1 from Rethinking Medications.
End Notes for Rethinking Medications to save you from flipping back and forth.
This PDF of the Notes section serves as companion to the book. Readers who work at a university or academic medical center will have ready access to journal articles through the citations provided. For others, public access is provided through the government’s PubMed Central.
Additional Note: Future updates and corrections are likely to be necessary in a book that takes on as many issues as this one does. These will be added to this website as received.