Money Talks - 12.23.14

Tuesday December 23, 3pm EST: Mitchell will be featuring the film, Money Talks: Profits Before Patient Safety, with guests Holly Mosher, Jeanne Lenzer and John Abramson, M.D.

This film is a straightforward look at the pharmaceutical industry and the way it has come to dominate medicine.

Money Talks exposes the deceptive tactics that big drug companies use to make record profits by playing with the safety of our family’s health care. Using misleading advertising, attractive “drug reps” who wine and dine doctors and other unethical practices, the drug industry makes billions of dollars every year selling us unsafe, unnecessary and overpriced drugs. If you want to protect the people you love from their dangerous practices that compromise the safety and quality of our health care, Money Talks is a must-see film. It includes interviews with investigative journalists, medical professionals, former pharmaceutical sales representatives, and others. It is directed and edited by John Ennis and produced by Holly Mosher. Among the cast are John Abramson, M.D. and Jeanne Lenzer.

.

.

Watch the trailer:

.
.
Purchase this DVD 

.
Holly Mosher grew up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In high school she developed a passion for both photography and philosophy that led her to pursue filmmaking. In her college entrance paper, she cited George Orwell’s idea that all art should be political, and today, uses that concept to guide her work. For more on Holly, see earlier A Better World Newsletters.

.

.

.

.

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.I

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.

Purchase John’s Book 

He has been published in the New York and LA Times and made more than 50 appearances on national TV, including two appearances onThe Today Show.

Dr. Abramson is serving as an expert consultant to plaintiff’s attorneys in several cases involving the drug industry.