Dr. Healy’s Pharmageddon is one of those books to be read, not summarized. It’s not that it’s filled with new information. He sees what the rest of us see, albeit from the position more interior than most – a neuroscientist who has been embedded in the scene. He writes about the primacy of the pharmaceutical industry, the corruption of academic medicine, the rise of the clinical research industry and the sequestration of their data, the deification of statistics, ghost-writing, etc – the things many of us decry and can’t seem to stop writing about. But what’s different about this book is first that Dr. Healy doesn’t stop with this obvious symptom list, he goes on to generalize these symptoms beyond the boundaries of psychiatry and mental health to the entire domain of modern medicine [and perhaps beyond]. While most of us remain preoccupied with the self-serving greed that lies just under the surface of these symptoms, Dr. Healy rises above [or gets underneath?] the obvious and tells us stories of how former attempts to keep this predictable human force in check in previous times have backfired and lead us to the present – the law of unintended consequences prevails [with a lot of help from a determined industry].