On the Take: How Medicine's Complicity with Big Business Can Endanger Your Health

"Some physicians become known as whores." This is strong language in Kassirer's mostly temperate but tough look at how big business is corrupting medicine—but according to Kassirer, one doctor's wife used the word "whore" to describe her husband's accepting high fees to promote medical products. Such personal anecdotes distinguish Kassirer's look at the conversion of America's health-care system into a commercial enterprise. Kassirer, former editor-in-chief of the prestigious New England Journal of Medicine, notes the range of conflicts of interest between profit-centered business and people-centered medicine.