Charles C. Mann
...the best popular book I've read on the subject....More knowledge or more affordable drugs? Such awful dilemmas, common in pharmaceitical circles, should be widely discussed at a time when medical care is of ever-greater public concern. Bitter Pills helps inform the debate.
— New York Times Book Review
Journal of the American Medical Association
The book is overall informative and engaging. It serves as an excellent primer and source of information for consumers of medication and professionals alike and is well indexed and readable. I would recommend Bitter Pills to anyone who uses or prescribes pharmaceuticals.
Publishers Weekly
- Publisher's Weekly
Five years ago, Fried's wife, after taking an antibiotic for a minor urinary tract infection, developed such side effects as delirium, visual distortions and insomnia, followed by a debilitating manic-depressive illness that the prescription drug apparently triggered. This report on the often lethal hazards of over-the-counter and prescription medications intertwines Fried's personal story of coping with his wife's condition and an informal, scattershot probe into the drug development and approval process, based on interviews with doctors, FDA officials, consumer advocates, neuroscientists, pharmaceutical executives and sales reps, lawyers and pharmacologists. By turns tedious and revealing, his labyrinthine investigation is sprinkled with useful suggestions for revamping U.S. drug testing and regulatory procedures. Freelance writer Fried includes cases involving adverse reactions to heart medicines, anti-inflammatory and psychiatric drugs, skin creams, anti-asthmatics and AIDS medications. He highlights the laxity of safety standards regarding the prescribing of drugs for children and pregnant women. An appendix offers guidelines for consumers on assessing potential drug dangers, and dealing with doctors and pharmacists.
Booknews
Investigative journalist Stephen Fried explores the sometimes deadly world of legal, mostly prescription, drugs. After his wife became extremely ill using a prescription drug in 1992, Fried launched into an investigation of that specific drug, the drug companies, the FDA, doctors' educations, and the thousands of adverse reactions to legal drugs every year. Several appendices (written with the aid of doctors) educate consumers on how to read a drug package insert, how to make one's doctor write smarter prescriptions, and how to avoid adverse reactions. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Booknews
This sobering investigation into serious hazards of prescription and over-the-counter (OTC) legal drugs in the US begins with a harrowing account of the author's wife's debilitating neurological "side- effects" from one dose of a new antibiotic, Floxin. His five-year probe of the entire legal drug culture raises frightening questions about legal drugs and the pharmaceutical industry, the single most profitable legal manufacturing industry in the world. This paperback edition contains a new afterword and expanded appendices highlighting specific ways to take drugs safely. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
Kirkus Reviews
A big, sprawling, highly personal inquiry into the making, approval, selling, and prescribing of drugs. When a single dose of the antiobiotic Floxin sent Diane Fried to the emergency room in delirium and left her with serious neurological problems, her journalist husband turned his investigative eye on Floxin's safety. It is a well-told story, fascinating and often frightening, occupying nearly a third of this book. From it, Fried (Thing of Beauty, 1993) then began a broader investigation into the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, seeking to find the flaws in the process by which drugs make it from pharmaceutical lab to family medicine cabinet. Fried attended medical and scientific conferences and government hearings, compiled enormous files of documents, and seemingly interviewed just about anyone with anything pertinent or interesting to tell him about the hazards of legal drugs: researchers, pharmaceutical company reps, FDA officials, and patients with adverse-reaction stories. Trying for the big picture, he seems more often to resemble the blind men struggling to figure out the nature of an elephant from its separate parts. While this work lacks focus, Fried has an ingratiating personal style and he provides some insightful interviews with insiders as well as information on the safety of quinolones (the drug family embracing Floxin), how the FDA dealt with thalidomide in the 1960s, the development of powerful protease inhibitors to treat AIDs, and the growth of direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. As might be expected, pharmaceutical companies come in for heavy criticism, but so does the federal government, for inadequacies in surveillance of drugs forpossible adverse affects once they're on the market. To reassure the nervous consumer, there's an appendix on how to read a drug package insert and how to ask the right questions of one's physician and pharmacist. For all its virtues, a collection of absorbing articles that never quite coalesces into a cohesive whole.
