The Supermeds: How the Big Business of Medicine Is Endangering Our Health Care

Abstract

In 1906, when Theodore Roosevelt borrowed a metaphor fromPilgrim's Progressto warn against unbalanced reporting, he coined name for a journalistic tradition. most tenacious investigative reporters of that day became known as muckrakers, after Bunyan's description of the man with muckrake. Among targets of these reporters, many were medical businesses. first was patent medicine industry, which Samuel Hopkins Adams exposed in a series of magazine articles that helped to pass Pure Food and Drug Act. More than 100 000 reprints of Adams' articles were distributed by American Medical Association, which also began running its own exposes of nostrums and quacks in a regular column inJAMA, The Propaganda for Reform. Another report in muckraking tradition was Abraham Flexner'sBulletin Number Four, with its attack on proprietary medical schools. From 1930s through mid-1960s, a period when organized medicine's