In this episode of Causes or Cures, Dr. Eeks chats with Dr. Jerry Avorn, a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, drug safety watchdog, and author of Rethinking Medications: Truth, Power, and the Drugs You Take. If you’ve ever felt uneasy about the rising cost of prescription drugs, the process or speed by which new meds are approved, or why the side effects list is longer than your grocery receipt, this episode is for you.
Dr. Avorn pulls no punches. We talk about:
- How our current system rewards speed over evidence, and why “accelerated approval” may sound good but can lead to disaster.
- The rise of drugs approved with weak or surrogate endpoints, yet priced like gold (yep, you still pay full price for half-baked science).
- Shocking case studies, like the Vioxx heart attack debacle and the controversial Alzheimer’s drug Aduhelm.
- The FDA’s evolution from watchdog to lapdog (in some cases).
- Conflicts of interest.
- Public funding, private profits: how taxpayer money fuels breakthroughs that we can’t afford. (WTF!)
- And, yes, we talk about the “Do Your Own Research” crowd.
Dr. Avorn’s mission? Help patients and doctors actually understand what they’re taking or prescribing, and what forces are shaping those decisions.
Why listen?
Because behind every pill is a story, and it’s not always the one you’re told in the ad with the beach scene and happy jazz flute.
Links:
Grab the book: Rethinking Medications: Truth, Power, and the Drugs You Take (Simon & Schuster, 2025)
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 approach of “academic detailing” to provide 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 commentaries in the New York Times, The Washington Post, JAMA, and The New England Journal of Medicine.
You can contact Dr. Eeks at bloomingwellness.com.
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