Taking on Big Pharma: Dr Charles Bennett's Battle

Charles L. Bennett, MD, PhD, MPP, was the first AC Buehler Chair of Medicine and Economics at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine and Kellogg School of Management. He spent decades identifying fatal and previously unrecognized side effects of billion-dollar drugs.

Stephen Rosen, MD, former provost of the City of Hope, praised Bennett, stating, "Between 1994 and 2010, while at Northwestern’s Medical School, Charlie saved more lives than anyone in American medicine." However, Bennett's efforts have not gone without consequences. The Department of Justice and relevant pharmaceutical corporations responded to his findings by spreading lies about him, resulting in the loss of his position at Northwestern. Bennett was forced to pay $500,000 in a legal settlement, incurring an additional $1 million in legal fees. Former Northwestern University President Mort Schapiro even went as far as to denounce Bennett online and discourage other medical centers from employing him.

The full extent of Northwestern's and the Department of Justice's wrongdoing is detailed in "Taking on Big Pharma: Dr. Charles Bennett's Battle" (published by Skyhorse), which delves into the events surrounding Bennett's battle against the pharmaceutical industry.

Comments in the chat:
Johanna Trimble: Over 2 million Canadians visit an emergency department every year due to adverse drug events, unintended and harmful occurrences associated with medication use.
Our project: ActionADE https://actionade.org
Deena: I don't know if this is an appropriate question at this time, so feel free to ignore, but can you talk a bit about the "flox" drugs such as Cipro?
Kim Witczak: Great project Johanna!!! Too bad we don’t have similar project in US.
Johanna Trimble: Coincidence (??) — two of the drugs that show up on our ten most frequent/most serious list of drugs for ADEs in Emerg are on the top 6 list of drugs for which US doctors were paid the most kickback last year.
Deena: Can you list the 6 drugs?
Johanna Trimble: Can’t find the list but give me your email and I’ll try. One is Empagliflozin .
Johanna Trimble: I think John Mandrola might have done the study recently.
John Mellnik: A search for "flox cipro" on PubMed returns no results. Perhapse this is the wrong set of search terms, but are there peer reviewed papers published on this topic we could be pointed to?
Francois Maignen: You need to look for ciprofloxacin … not flox cipro
Brian Edlin: An evaluation of reports of ciprofloxacin, levofloxacin, and moxifloxacin-association neuropsychiatric toxicities, long-term disability, and aortic aneurysms/dissections disseminated by the Food and Drug Administration and the European Medicines Agency - PubMed (nih.gov)
Johanna Trimble: Our JAMA Paper on Industry Payments and Sowell's Conflict of Visions. Mandrola