John Abramson, MD on How Doctors are Taught to Practice Medicine

Doctors are trained to read and understand medical science and evolving medical science—the articles that come out in the medical journals and the guidelines. That’s their job. As they have been taught, that’s how they do their job. But the fact is that 96 percent of medical research is about new drugs and medical devices. In other words, 96 percent of research is about expensive new products that will generate the maximum return on investment to investors and to the executives of the drug companies who get paid in stock options… about 60 percent of their remuneration is in stock options.

So the doctors are taught to practice based on the results of those studies that they read in the journals. Ninety-six percent of them are about drugs and devices, because that’s where most of the money is. But the docs are taught that that’s what the knowledge is, and that their job is to practice consistent with the knowledge. So when they practice, they’re thinking, 96 percent of their mental energy, is about what drugs and devices to use.

But the truth is that only about 20 percent of our health has to do with health care, and about 80 percent of health has to do with how and where we live our lives. But because 96 percent of the research is about drugs and devices, the docs aren’t thinking about the healthy way of life of the individual patient and the healthy way of life of the community they’re serving.

[The doctors] are following the science. The problem is that the science is epidemiologically imbalanced because the return on investment is greater when you’re patenting new products that have basically no cap on the price you can charge, and that’s how the money is made.”

— John Abramson, MD, professor of clinical medicine at Harvard Medical School and author of “Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine”