Hey everybody, it's Chris and I've got a guest with me today to share with you and I'm so excited to talk to Dr. John Abramson because Dr. John Abramson was a family physician for 22 years and he's been on the faculty of Harvard Medical School for 25 years where he teaches health care policy. He also served as an expert in pharmaceutical litigation and as an unpaid consultant to the FBI and the Department of Justice, including in a case that resulted in the largest criminal fine in U.S. history.

Some of you know what case I'm talking about.

That was paid by Pfizer for making false claims

about their pain medication, Bextra. We'll get into that. I'm excited to talk about that.

And Dr. Abramson is the author of Overdosed America, the Promise of the Broken Promise of American

Medicine. And his latest book is called Sickening How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care

and How We Can Repair It.

So I, first of all, thank you so much for the incredible work you've done over your career.

And it takes a lot of courage to stand up to, you know, mega billion dollar corporations and call out their bad

behavior so i just want to start with by saying thanks for doing that well thank you for saying

that so i'd love to know how you became a medical and pharmaceutical industry watchdog

i didn't set out to do that.

I went into practice.

I finished my family practice residency and did a Robert Johnson Fellowship

and intended to be an academic physician,

but decided that my real calling

was to go out in the community and be a family doc.

So I left all that research and epidemiology study behind. And in 1982, went into private practice in a small

town about an hour north of Boston. And at that point, we were practicing good medicine. the price of American health care was high, but not sky high.

And things were pretty good.

But as we got into the 90s, it was clear that the drug companies were playing an increasing role in what doctors believed to be

the best health care. And at the end of the 90s, a drug came out called Vioxx. Are your

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