Medicine Grand Rounds- Dr. John Abramson presents: “Why We Can’t Trust the Evidence in Evidence-Based Medicine”

After completing a residency in Family Medicine and a 2-year Robert Wood Johnson fellowship, Dr. John Abramson practiced as a family physician for 20 years in a small town an hour north of Boston.   He also served for 7 years as chair of the department of family practice at Lahey Clinic. He has been on the Harvard Medical School faculty since 1997 and is currently a Lecturer in the Department of Health Care Policy.

In 2002, after becoming aware of the uncorrected misrepresentations about the benefits and dangers of Vioxx and Celebrex in our most respected medical journals, Dr. Abramson left his practice to devote his full attention to researching the quality of the information doctors must rely on. In September 2004 he published Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine. Just one week later, Vioxx was withdrawn in the biggest drug recall ever, but not before it had killed between 40 and 60,000 Americans, despite providing no better relief than inexpensive OTC anti-inflammatory drugs.

From 2005 through the present, Dr. Abramson has continued his research and served as an expert in litigation involving prescription drugs and medical devices, with each case giving him access to millions of pages of confidential corporate documents and unreleased clinical trial data. He has also served as a consultant to the FBI and U. S. Department of Justice, including a case that led to what was, at the time, the largest criminal fine in U.S. history.

Dr. Abramson has published multiple articles in peer-reviewed journals, made numerous national media appearances, and written many op-ed pieces, including 2 in the New York Times. His primary research interest is the extent to which the commercial takeover of medical knowledge, primarily by drug companies, is compromising the quality of medical information available to even the most dedicated doctors, harming our health, and wasting enormous amounts of Americans’ wealth. In February 2022 Dr. Abramson published his second book, Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It.