From The New York Times: “Dr. David Egilman, a physician and expert witness who, over a 35-year span, gave testimony in some 600 trials involving corporate malfeasance, resulting in billions of dollars in awards for victims and their survivors, died on April 2 at his home in Foxborough, Mass. He was 71.
. . . Many medical experts make a side business in court, offering their informed opinions on the witness stand and helping to validate or undermine plaintiffs’ claims. But few make it a career-long passion in the way Dr. Egilman did. He taught at Brown University and ran a private practice but spent most of his time consulting and testifying in as many as 15 cases a year.
. . . ‘As a doctor, I can treat one cancer patient at a time,’ he said during a 2018 trial. ‘But by being here, I have the potential to save millions.’
. . . He also pushed back against what he saw as pharmaceutical marketing intruding on the realm of scientific research. Writing in peer-reviewed medical journals, he showed how drug companies used tactics like ghostwriting — drawing up their own studies, then paying a doctor to add their name — and ‘seeding,’ in which companies run their own questionable studies to build support for their drugs.
. . . After medical school and training at the National Institutes of Health, he moved to Cincinnati, where he set up a clinic as part of the U.S. Public Health Service. Many of his patients were industrial and mining workers who had developed medical conditions after years of working in unsafe environments.
The experience steeled Dr. Egilman’s determination to stand up against medical injustice. He returned to Massachusetts in 1985, where he opened a private practice and began teaching at Brown.
To handle his growing list of legal clients, he set up a separate company, Never Again Consulting, a nod both to his father’s experience during the Holocaust as well as the importance of not allowing the horrors of Nazi medical experimentation to be replicated.”
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