Documentary Expert Consultants
Shannon Brownlee (Washington DC)Shannon Brownlee’s stories and essays about medicine, healthcare, and biotechnology have appeared in such publications as The Atlantic, Business Week, Discover, The New York Times Magazine, Salon, The New Republic, Time, The Washington Monthly, The Washington Post Magazine, and 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'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.
As a Bernard L. Schwartz Senior Fellow at the New America Foundation, Ms. Brownlee focuses on the lack of scientific evidence behind many common medical practices, a flaw in the healthcare system with which many economists and policy experts are well acquainted, but which is practically invisible to the American public. She is currently writing a book about the cultural and economic forces that drive doctors and hospitals to overtreat, and the link between overutilization, the cost of U.S. healthcare, and its poor quality.
Kenneth Kaitin
Dr. Kaitin, who has served as the Director of the Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development since 1998, is an internationally recognized expert on the science of drug development. He publishes extensively on the factors that contribute to the slow pace and high cost of pharmaceutical R&D and the impact of regulatory and legislative initiatives to speed new drug development and review. He also testifies in Congress on drug development issues, and is frequently quoted in the business and trade press on R&D trends in the research–based pharmaceutical industry. Dr. Kaitin is an Associate Professor of Medicine at Tufts University School of Medicine, and he is a former president of the Drug Information Association and editor–in–chief of the Drug Information Journal. He received a B.S. from Cornell University and an M.S., and Ph.D. in pharmacology from the University of Rochester.
Gene Carbona
Gene Carbona is the Executive Director of sales for The Medical Letter (an evidenced based source of information on newly released pharmaceutical agents). He is a formal pharmaceutical sales representative for Merck.
Sydney Wolfe MD
Sydney Wolfe, MD is the director of the Public Citizen Health Research Group and one of the nations leading consumer advocates on health care. Since joining Public Citizen in 1972, he has fought for protection against unsafe drugs, foods, medical devices and workplaces, and for greater consumer control over health decisions. He is the author of numerous books and articles and has testified before Congress and federal regulatory agencies more than 100 times. He has served as a consultant to the National Cancer Institute and currently teaches at Johns Hopkins University, Case Western Reserve and Cornell University. In 1990, Dr Wolfe received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.
Susan Reverby (Boston)
Susan M. Reverby is Professor of Women's Studies at Wellesley College and an historian of American women, medicine, and nursing. As Wellesley's first faculty hire in Women's Studies, she has taught at the college since l982. She is the editor of numerous volumes on women's history, the history of medicine, and the history of nursing. Her prize-winning book, Ordered to Care: The Dilemma of American Nursing (New York: Cambridge University Press, l987) is still considered one of the major overview histories of American nursing. She is a former health policy analyst and women's health activist. From l993–l997 she served as the consumer representative on the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Obstetrics and Gynecology Devices Advisory Panel. Her current research focuses on the infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study, run by the U.S. Public Health Service between 1932 and 1972, which examined untreated syphilis in African American men and was conducted without the men's knowledge of its experimental nature. She is the editor of Tuskegee's Truths: Rethinking the Tuskegee Syphilis Study (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000) and is completing a new book on the differing ways the story of the Study are told. She was a member of the Legacy Committee on the Tuskegee Syphilis Study that successfully lobbied then-President Bill Clinton to offer a public apology to the surviving men and their heirs in l997. Her work on this project has been supported by several grants and residencies at the W.E.B. DuBois Research Center and the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard.
Susan Reverby received her B.S. degree from Cornell University in Industrial and Labor Relations/Labor History in l967. She earned an M.A. in American Civilization from New York University in l973 and a Ph.D. in American Studies from Boston University in 1982.
Jerry Avorn MD (Boston)
Jerry Avorn, M.D. is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Chief of the Division of Pharmacoepidemiology and Pharmacoeconomics at Brigham and Women's Hospital. An internist, geriatrician, and pharmaco-epidemiologist, his research centers on medication use, with particular reference to elderly patients and chronic disease. Topics of particular interest include: scientific, policy, and social determinants of physician prescribing practices; efficacy and effectiveness of specific medications; compliance by patients with prescribed regimens; methods to improve the appropriateness of drug prescribing and drug taking; quantification of risks and benefits of drugs; and pharmaceutical cost-effectiveness analysis. Dr. Avorn is also director of the Program for the Analysis of Clinical Strategies, a research unit with faculty and staff representing the disciplines of epidemiology, internal medicine, health services research, psychiatry, and biostatistics.
He is the author of Powerful Medicines: The Benefits, Risks, and Costs of Prescription Drugs (Knopf, 2004).
David Blumenthal (Boston)
From 1987-1991, Dr. Blumenthal served as Senior Vice President at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, a 720-bed Harvard teaching hospital. From 1981 to 1987 he was Executive Director of the Center for Health Policy and Management and Lecturer on Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. During the late 1970s, Blumenthal was a professional staff member on Senator Edward Kennedy’s Senate Subcommittee on Health and Scientific Research.
He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, a National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences, and serves on several editorial boards, including the American Journal of Medicine, Journal of Health Politics, Policy and Law, and the Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine. He is also a National Correspondent for The New England Journal of Medicine. He serves on advisory committees to the National Academy of Sciences, the Institute of Medicine, the National Academy of Social Insurance, the Open Society Institute and other foundations.
Dr. Blumenthal was the founding chairman of AcademyHealth (formerly the Academy for Health Services Research and Health Policy), the national organization of health services researchers. He is also Director of the Harvard University Interfaculty Program for Health Systems Improvement. From 1995 to 2002 Dr. Blumenthal served as Executive Director for The Commonwealth Fund Task Force on Academic Health Centers.
Dr. Blumenthal was a panel member and an author of the IOM report on the “Future of Drug Safety” (Sept. 2006).
Bradley Lewis MD PhD NYU
B.A. 1978, M.D. 1982, Tennessee; Ph.D. 1986, George Washington
Bradley Lewis has dual training in interdisciplinary humanities and medicine (specializing in psychiatry). He writes and teaches at the interface of medicine, bioscience, humanities, cultural studies, science studies, and disability studies. He is the cultural studies editor for the Journal of Medical Humanities and has recently published a book, Postpsychiatry: Theorizing Psychiatry, Prozac, and DSM. His current book project is a narrative study of sadness. He is part of a growing number of academics in medical humanities and cultural studies who brings the fruits of theoretical humanities to the biosciences. Professor Lewis is particularly interested in work that teases out questions of difference and inclusion (class, race, sexual preference, gender, nation status) in the creation and application of scientific knowledge.
Joel Lexchin MD (Toronto)
Joel Lexchin is Associate Professor at the School of Health Policy and Management, York University and the Department of Family and Community Medicine, University of Toronto, and Emergency Physician, Department of Emergency Medicine, University Health Network. He earned an M.D. from the University of Toronto in 1977. He has done significant research on pharmaceutical promotion both to doctors and consumers. He is currently working on a study comparing the quality of drug advertising in medical journals under different regulatory regimes,
Joel Lexchin (MD University of Toronto, 1977) has worked as an emergency physician at the University Health Network since 1988. His research interests include: physician prescribing behaviour, pharmaceutical promotion and the drug approval process. He has been a consultant on pharmaceutical issues to the Ontario government, the federal Auditor General, the government of New Zealand, the Australian National Prescribing Service, and the World Health Organization
Dr. Nancy Crigger PhD, RN
Dr. Crigger is a Nurse Ethicist at William Jewel College in Missouri. She authored a recent article entitled "Compassionate nursing professionals as good citizens of the world" that appeared in Advances of Nursing Science. Dr. Crigger earned her BSN from the University of Kansas, her MS from Texas Women's University, MSN from University of Central Florida, and MA and PhD from University of Florida.
Elissa Ladd, PhD, RN, FNP
Elissa Ladd received her undergraduate nursing degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Master of Science degree from Rush University and PhD from the University of Massachusetts. She has been a practicing nurse practitioner for appx. 20 years and has taught in graduate programs in nursing at the University of Massachusetts and most recently at the MGH Institute of Health Professions. Her research interests are in pharmaceutical policy and prescribing behaviors.