As a medical and organizational sociologist, I have done years of comparative health care policy, especially around issues of access and institutional ethics. I have written a series of overviews about the medical profession and society as well as studies about the myths of greater efficiency from competition in health care. A more recent focus has been on the widely promoted but unsupported claims by the pharmaceutical industry that their R&D costs are very high, that US prices have to be higher because Canadians and Europeans price so low that cannot recover even R&D costs (ridiculous based on both evidence and logic), that Americans are much more innovative than Europeans (when their own data show this isn't the case), and that new drugs are better and save money. See my website at pharmamyths.net. My work at Harvard has focused on the epidemic of harmful side effects from prescription drugs, which independent expert bodies find provide few or no advantages over existing drugs about 90 percent of the time. But they all have risks of harm. About 1 in 11 new drugs are clinical superior, but about 1 in 5 new drugs result in serious harms. Thus the FDA and EMA are major partners of drug companies in approving scores of minor clinical variations that clever marketing get doctors to prescribe. Thus their risks of harm proliferate, what Brody and I call the "inverse benefit law" of pharmaceutical marketing. The more widely drugs are marketed, the more diluted become their benefits but the more widespread become their harmful side effects.