For millennia, human survival depended on our innate abilities to fight pathogens and repair injuries. Only recently has medical science prolonged longevity and improved quality of life. Physicians and academic researchers contribute to such progress, but the principal contributor is private industry that produces the tools - drugs and medical devices - enabling doctors to prevent and cure disease. Heavy regulation and biology's complexity and unpredictability make medical innovation extremely difficult and expensive. Pharmaphobia describes how an ideological crusade, stretching over the last quarter century, has used distortion and flawed logic to make medical innovation even harder in a misguided pursuit of theoretical professional purity. Bureaucrats, reporters, politicians, and predatory lawyers have built careers attacking the medical products industry, belittling its critical contributions to medical innovation and accusing it of non-existent malfeasance: overselling product value, flaunting safety and corrupting physicians and academics who partner with it. The mania has imposed "conflict-of-interest" regulations limiting or banning valuable interactions between industry and physicians and researchers and diverting scarce resources from innovation to compliance. The victims are patients suffering from cancer, dementia, and other serious diseases for which new treatments are delayed, reduced, or eliminated as a result of these pointless regulations. With breathtaking detail, Thomas Stossel shows how this attack on doctors who work with industry limits medical innovation and inhibits the process of bringing new products into medical care.
Introduction Part I: Some Benefits and the Mechanics of Medical Innovation Chapter 1: The Stakes Chapter 2: A Practitioner's History of Medical Innovation Part II: Why We Have a Medical Innovation Crisis Chapter 3: Enter the Conflict-of-Interest Mania Chapter 4: The Mania Mongers Part III: Why They Are Wrong Chapter 5: Abusing Evidence Chapter 6: Bad Policy Process Chapter 7: Flawed and Damaging Policies Chapter 8: Misunderstanding Innovation Chapter 9: Economic Illiteracy Chapter 10: Misplaced Criticism of Incremental Innovation Chapter 11: Rushing to Judgment with Product Safety Alarms Chapter 12: Demonizing Marketing is False Advertising Chapter 13: The "Gift" Smoke Screen Chapter 14: The Lawyers' Ball Part IV: The Damage They Do and How to Stop It Chapter 15: The Price We Pay Chapter 16: What Is To Be Done?
