OK, my vote for the most important book of 2005 — Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Jared Diamond. If we don’t read and understood Diamond’s lessons, we’re screwed — not just US, but worldwide. Frightening, mind-bending, and important.
Most important health book of 2005: On the Take: How Medicine’s Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health, by Dr. Jerome Kassirer. The title kinda gives away the punch line. Kassirer is no neophyte — he was editor of the New England Journal of Medicine, and let go for balking at new marketing schemes there. His book is far from the best read — the endless stream of outrages loses moral punch after so many of them are documented. His thesis — every aspect of medicine has been distorted and corrupted by commercial influence: medical schools, medical residency, continuing medical education, journals, professional medical societies, and the clinical research enterprise itself. Exhaustive details and documentation accompany every indictment.
And every example of corruption has a commercial entity lined up behind it, promoting drugs and medical devices. The head of the National Institutes of Health commented that if their review panels had to exclude clinical researchers with conflicts of interest, they would have no more juries. It’s not hard to draw the conclusion that some significant part of rampant medical inflation that is bankrupting our economy is tied to the explosion of this commercial orgy.
What’s surprising — having just finished the book — is that it was received with such a collective yawn. Perhaps it was deliberate benign neglect. Whatever, the commercially compromised portions of our medical-industrial complex succeeded in getting few folks to sit up and take notice of this vitally important and challenging book. Let’s spread the word…
