Shannon Brownlee

Shannon Brownlee is a writer whose stories, essays, and opinion pieces about medicine and health care have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic Monthly, The New York Times Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, Time, Discover, BusinessWeek, Washington Monthly, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wilson Quarterly. Her most recent awards include the 2004 AHCJ Award for Excellence in Health Care Journalism, the Victor Cohn Prize for Excellence in Medical Science Reporting, the National Association of Science Writers Science-in-Society Award, and the Sigma Delta Chi Award from the Society of Professional Journalists. Her work has been featured in The Real State of the Union, a collection of the best stories from The Atlantic Monthly’s “Real State of the Union” series, and in The New Science Journalists, a collection of the best science writing edited by Ted Anton and Rick McCourt. She holds a master’s degree in biology from the University of California.

As a Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Ms. Brownlee’s work focuses on the U.S. health care system, and the cultural, economic, and political forces that result in poor quality and high cost. She has written extensively about the lack of scientific evidence for many medical practices, and the problem of unnecessary care, which accounts for as much as a third of the nation’s health care bill. She is currently writing Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine is Making Americans Sicker and Poorer, which will be published by Bloomsbury Press in 2007.