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Chasing Medical Miracles
Alex O'Meara
The Promise and Perils of Clinical Trials
Walker & Company
June 2009
On Sale: June 9, 2009
272 pages
ISBN: 0802716962
EAN: 9780802716965
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction
Journalist Alex O’Meara is one of the more than twenty
million Americans enrolled in a clinical trial—three times
as many people as a decade ago. Indeed, clinical trials have
become a $24 billion industry that is reshaping every aspect
of health-care development and delivery in the United States
and around the world. As O’Meara chronicles, twentieth-century medical trials have
led to epic advances in health care, from asthma inhalers
and insulin pumps to heart valves and pacemakers. And yet,
although regulations safeguard against grossly unethical
tests, significant problems are still associated with how
clinical trials are carried out and reported. For example,
despite eight clinical trials for Vioxx before the FDA
approved it in 1998 for use as a painkiller, Merck took it
off the market in 2004, too late for the eighty-eight
thousand Americans who suffered heart attacks while taking
Vioxx and the thirty-eight thousand who died.
Chasing Medical Miracles is the first book to give readers a
behind-the-scenes look at the complicated world of clinical
trials, revealing how a multibillion-dollar industry of
private companies conducting them with little oversight has
taken root and quietly become a major part of the American
medical establishment. Whether you are participating in a
clinical trial, considering that option, or interested in
our medical system, Alex O’Meara’s ground-breaking book is
essential reading.
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