About The Book

Suddenly, everything seems up for grabs about the medicines we take: Do they really work as advertised? Do some of them have dangerous, undisclosed side effects? Why are they so expensive, even unaffordable?

About The Author

Photograph by Karen Tucker

Jerry Avorn, MD, is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a senior internist in the Mass General Brigham health-care system. He built a leading research center at Harvard to study medication use, outcomes, costs, and policies and developed the educational outreach approach known as “academic detailing,” providing evidence-based information about medications to prescribers. One of the nation’s most highly cited researchers, Dr. Avorn is the author of Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs, and he has written or cowritten over six hundred papers in the medical literature as well as opinion pieces in The New York Times, The Washington Post, JAMA, and The New England Journal of Medicine.

Product Details

  • Publisher: Simon & Schuster (April 22, 2025)
  • Length: 512 pages
  • ISBN13: 9781668052853

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Raves and Reviews

“Dr. Avorn is uniquely qualified to write this book. He writes with the authority of seasoned scholar and the clarity of a skilled communicator. High profile examples are documented to illustrate his insights.The content is extraordinarily up to date…This is an important book for our time. Dr. Avorn builds his case skillfully and litigates his recommendations for reform persuasively. It is appropriate reading for medical professionals, policy makers, pharmaceutical professionals, and healthcare consumers. Highly recommended!”—David Weinberg, MD, Science-Based Medicine

"A masterful assessment of a highly flawed health care system."—Kirkus

"A damning survey of the drug development system’s many failures, this enlightens even as it infuriates."Publishers Weekly

"This eye-opening look at the pharmaceutical industry should make FDA officials want to scrutinize drug approvals more carefully, doctors want to prescribe more carefully, and patients want to consume more carefully."Booklist

"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

"Rethinking Medications gives us the historical and recent lessons we need to move forward with smarter solutions for the U.S. healthcare industry."—Mark Cuban, entrepreneur, drug cost innovator, and former Shark Tank principal.

"Rethinking Medications offers a rare combination of deep knowledge, common sense, and an engaging style; Avorn’s account of pharma’s achievements and scandals is simultaneously illuminating and infuriating. Americans have been paying too much for drugs and too little attention to the ways we could improve drug policy. This book is a guide to how we could be a healthier nation at a more affordable cost."—Paul Starr, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Social Transformation of American Medicine

"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

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