© Seth Abramson
During a live radio interview on a powerful Midwestern station, the host asked what seemed like a softball question: Why did I leave my practice to write Overdosed America? I told him that I had witnessed great medical progress during my more than twenty years as a family doctor. But at the same time I had also watched the influence of the drug industry and other medical industries grow, and neither the public nor doctors understood how detrimental this was to American health care.
He said he believed that, but that he knew other doctors who felt the same way. So what led me, as opposed to them, to write this book? I told him that I had studied statistics, research design, and epidemiology twenty-five years earlier as a Robert Wood Johnson Fellow. That the skills I had acquired during those two years allowed me to read the articles in medical journals with a more critical eye than most practicing doctors. And that once I really understood the startling impact of this growing commercial bias on the “scientific evidence” that informs medical decisions, I wanted to share my findings with health professionals and the public.
Once again, he said he believed all that, but still I hadn’t explained why I would have committed three years of my life and exposed myself to considerable personal risk to take on an industry as powerful as Big Pharma. I reached deeper, telling him I had come of intellectual age during the late 1960s, when the country was being torn apart by our ill-conceived military venture in Vietnam. I told him that during those years I learned that public information often cannot be taken at face value and that committed scholars and journalists could make the truth available for those who cared enough to seek it out. My awakening to the potential of critical scholarship as the antidote to public disinformation purveyed by vested interests was, ultimately, what led me to write this book.
To be sure, there was an element of throwing caution to the wind in leaving my practice to write an exposé of American medicine. But, I explained to my host, I had no option: not writing Overdosed America would have left me forever knowing that I had been in a position, a privileged and somewhat unique position, to explain the commercial hijacking of my profession, but that I had lacked the courage to go forward. Finally, my host was satisfied. 
“I had come of intellectual age during the late 1960s, when the country was being torn apart by our ill-conceived military venture in Vietnam.. . . During those years I learned that public information often cannot be taken at face value.”
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