John
Abramson, M.D., has worked as a family doctor in Appalachia with the
National Health Service Corps and for 20 years in Hamilton,
Massachusetts. He was a Robert Wood Johnson fellow and is currently on
the clinical faculty at Harvard Medical School, where he teaches
primary care. He served for 7 years as chairman of the department of
family practice at Lahey Clinic. He was twice voted "best doctor" in
his area by readers of the local newspapers and three times selected by
his peers as one of a handful of best family practitioners in
Massachusetts.
Dr. Abramson is the author of Overdo$ed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine,
published by Harper Collins in September, 2004. He has been published
in the New York and LA Times and made more than 50 appearances on
national TV, including two appearances on The Today Show.
Dr. Abramson is serving as an expert consultant to plaintiff's attorneys in several cases involving the drug industry.
Alex
Sugerman-Brozan is the Director of the Prescription Access Litigation
Project (PAL), an organization that works
to end illegal pharmaceutical price inflation and deceptive marketing
by using class-action litigation and public education. A coalition of
over 115 consumer organizations in 35 states, PAL members have been
involved in more than two dozen class-action lawsuits, challenging the
illegal drug industry tactics that have artificially raised the price
of prescription drugs and/or deceived the public as to the benefits and
risks of prescriptions.
PAL hosts the annual Bitter Pill Awards,
which use humor to highlight the serious problems caused by drug
industry marketing practices, particularly direct-to-consumer
advertising (DTCA). Prior to joining the PAL Project, Sugerman-Brozan
was a staff attorney at Health Law Advocates - non-profit public
interest law firm affiliated with Health Care For All Massachusetts.
Health Law Advocates provides free legal representation to low-income
consumers experiencing legal problems related to health care. He
received his law degree from Northeastern School of Law.
Bob Goodman MD
Bob Goodman, MD graduated from
Rutgers and The New Jersey Medical School at The University of Medicine
and Dentistry of New Jersey. He did his residency training in Primary
Care Internal Medicine at The Montefiore Medical Center in the Bronx.
Following a chief resident year, he joined the Division of General Medicine at
The Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons and served Program Director of the Primary Care Internal Medicine training program and Associate
Director of the Categorical Internal Medicine program.
In the spring of 1999, he started No
Free Lunch, an organization dedicated to encouraging health care providers to "Just say no" to pharmaceutical
industry gifts and enticements. In January of 2001, the No Free
Lunch Pledge was initiated, creating a listing of health care providers pledging to accept no gifts from the industry.
Later, Dr. Goodman was a Physician Advocacy
Fellow in the Open Society Institute's Medicine as a Profession
Program, and worked closely with the American Medical Student
Association on its PharmFree initiative. He is also the medical director of CoSMO,
the Columbia medical students' Free Clinic.
Jeanne Lenzer
Jeanne Lenzer is a medical investigative journalist and a stringer for the British Medical Journal. She has also written for Slate, The Scientist, Mother Jones, USA Today, Newsweek-Japan and The London Independent,
among others. Her key area of interest is how scientific data and
conclusions are often distorted by financial conflicts of interest. She
has investigated such influences related to tPA for stroke, GP IIb/IIIa
inhibitors, COX-2 inhibitors and selective and non-selective serotonin
reuptake inhibitors. Her most recent work involves hidden industry
ties with academia and the suppression of raw and summary data by the
FDA, CDC, and NIH.
Jerome Hoffman MD
Dr. Jerome Hoffman has been a
full-time faculty member at UCLA since 1979, where he teaches emergency
medicine and heads the doctoring program. In addition to general
medical education, Dr. Hoffman’s research includes health services and
clinical decision-making. He holds degrees from Princeton, Columbia,
and the University of California.
