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Our Daily Meds
by Melody Petersen

A sobering reminder, if one were needed, that the doctor is NOT your friend. Especially when he's on the take from the drug companies.

That's the biggest takeaway from author Petersen's exposé of the pharmaceutical industry. It's one thing to state the notion--which by now is fairly obvious--that the drug companies are the province of sleazy lowlifes. Given all we've seen the last decade and a half--a sickening torrent of prescription drug commercials for every ailment ever imagined by the marketer's mind; heavily-hyped medicines being recalled by the government for being downright deadly, let alone ineffective; the lack of substantive drugs to cure sickness, versus an avalanche of pills designed to symptom-treat (not cure) chronic conditions--it hardly comes as a surprise that Petersen's well-researched pages reveal the corruption that has sunk all the way into big pharma's core.

But it is striking and surprising to learn from those same pages how deeply compromised this nation's doctors are. Our Daily Meds provides voluminous examples that demonstrate that, apparently, doctors in this country have never met a bribe they didn't like. Petersen makes a strong case that all of the expensive dinners, luxury vacations, and hefty cash payments that doctors take from the pharmaceutical companies has had direct negative effects on the health of people both in this country and possibly around the world.

That said, the book does suffer minor flaws, the biggest of which is a certain repetitiveness. One story of corruption tends to blend into another as the pharma companies use the same tactics, over and over again, to get their "new" drugs out to the market and to encourage doctors to write millions of dubious, often needless prescriptions to boost sales. One also must note that Petersen is not the best prose stylist; the text contains a distractingly high number of passages that could have used better editing.

Nevertheless, Our Daily Meds delivers what the nation's consumers and patients need the most--a harsh dose of reality. Reading this book will give you a clearer idea of just how distrustful you need to be when you walk into your doctor's office. If nothing else--or you're not in the mood to read it for yourself--at the very least we should all as serious questions whenever a doctor writes a prescription: Is this drug approved for this application? Is this a new drug, or has it been on the market for a while? Is there a generic version of this drug available?

Those questions may actually save your life someday. And if everyone starts asking those questions thanks to Petersen and her book, then the author can congratulate herself on a job well done.