"The Truth About the Drug Companies"

(in collaboration with the College of Health Professions and Biomedical Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and Humanities)

8:00 PM Monday, October 19, 2009
University Theatre

Americans spend more than $200 billion a year on prescription drugs.  What are they getting for their money?  Dr. Angell, a distinguished medical expert recently honored by Time magazine as one of the twenty-five most influential Americans, will provide a disturbing answer to this question. 

"Health Reform: Realistic and Unrealistic"

Faculty-Student Seminar (in collaboration with the College of Health Professions and Biomedical Sciences and the Institute of Medicine and Humanities)

3:10 PM Monday, October 19, 2009
St. Patrick Hospital Conference Room #2/#3

You are cordially invited to attend a seminar with Dr. Marcia Angell. After receiving her M.D. from Boston University School of Medicine in 1967, she trained in both internal medicine and anatomic pathology. She is a board-certified pathologist. In 1979, she joined the editorial staff of the New England Journal of Medicine, becoming executive editor in 1988. Time magazine identified her in 1997 as one of the twenty-five most influential people in the country. Two years later she took over as editor-in-chief of the NEJM, the first woman to serve in that capacity since the journal's founding in 1812. She resigned in 2000 and joined the faculty at Harvard Medical School. A frequent contributor to medical journals and popular media, she writes about medical ethics, health policy, the nature of medical evidence, medicine and the law, and end-of-life-health care. Her book, Science on Trial: The Clash of Medical Evidence and the Law in the Breast Implant Case (1996) received critical acclaim. With Stanley Robbins and, later, Vinay Kumar she co-authored the first three editions of the textbook, Basic Pathology. A 2004 article of hers in The New York Review of Books, "Your Dangerous Drug Store," sparked a fierce debate about what Americans are getting for the more than $200 billion that they spend on prescription drugs every year. Her most recent book, The Truth About the Drug Companies: How They Deceive Us and What to Do About It, also appeared in 2004. She is a trenchant critic of the U.S. health care system. Recently, she weighed in on The Huffington Post with a brutal evaluation of the health plan proposed by Senator Baucus, calling it a wholly unmerited stay of execution for "a system that's already shown itself capable of absorbing whatever we put into it, without providing anything like commensurate health care." She will offer her own ideas about how to solve the health care crisis in the United States.