What I learned Along The Way Was Everybody Was Cut Into The Deal Except for The Patient
Mike Magee on Code Blue: Inside America's Medical Industrial Complex | By Kimberly J. Soenen August 8, 2022
After reading “Code Blue,” by Mike Magee, I contacted him to learn more about his personal and professional evolution, from working as a high-level executive at one of the most profitable pharmaceutical companies in the world, to publicly criticizing the Medical Industrial Complex in the United States.
Mike Magee, MD is a medical historian and journalist on the faculty of Presidents College at the University of Hartford in the United States. He has held similar roles at a range of academic institutions. He was an Honorary Master Scholar at the N.Y.U. School of Medicine and a Distinguished Alumnus award recipient from the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.
Beginning as a country doctor in western New England, he rose to the highest levels of his profession holding senior executive positions at Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia, and as head of global medical affairs for Pfizer. He is the author of “Code Blue: Inside the Medical-Industrial Complex” (Grove Atlantic, 2020) and editor of the blog “Health Commentary” at HealthCommentary.org.
Born into a large family with many children, we began our conversation with his early life and how his family shaped his values as a physician.
Soenen: Where and when did you begin your career in healthcare and why?
Magee: My father was a doctor who did general medicine and general surgery. He served in WWII and returned to Fort Lee, New Jersey where he raised twelve children with my mother. His medical office was attached to our house. Two of my brothers and I ultimately became surgeons, and one sister became a nurse.
Soenen: What motivated you to enter medical school?
Magee: With my father as a role model, I entered medical school in 1969. In 1973, I began my surgical training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and specialized in Urology. After training, my wife and I moved with our three small children to Greenfield, Massachusetts in rural New England where I practiced Urology and continued to write.
Soenen: Have you ever been ill, injured, disabled, or close to death because of chance, circumstance or luck? Or, has anyone in your large family gone through health issues and if so, how did you navigate?
Magee: Throughout my life, I've had a wide range of patient experiences beginning with falling out of a second story window and fracturing my skull as a two year- old, which resulted in a two week Intensive Care Unit hospital stay at Columbia Presbyterian, to contracting polio at age five (now fully recovered), to contracting Hepatitis B as a surgical resident from a drug addicted victim of a gunshot wound, to a variety of surgeries and broken bones, to a (thankfully) minor heart attack three years ago.
Soenen: How has being from a large family impacted and informed your life as a physician?
Magee: Being from a family of twelve children, with a wife who is one of ten, we have experienced a full range of medical tragedies up close, as well as the ravages of aging that is now upon us both. This has included exposure to death as a child (my wife lost her father at age twelve when the youngest of ten was just six months old), and I lost a sister to drowning when she was four and I was eleven.
Soenen: Did you ever struggle with healthcare affordability or access?
Magee: The fact that I was the child of a prominent doctor did provide unique access to the United States healthcare system. His wealth also shielded us from poverty, which was not the case for my wife and her family. Yet neither of us avoided having to confront death, disability, mental illness and a range of traumas beginning early in our lives and extending up into the present.
Soenen: Your career is robust and layered, and has a very uncommon arc. Can you tell us about your career and spiritual path and the decisions that have informed where you are today?
Magee: In 1980, I published an Urology textbook for Cambridge University Press. Around this time, I became interested in the “consumer health” movement and became involved in local radio and television programming, and with a communications advisory committee, first at the Massachusetts Medical Society and the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), and then at the American Medical Associate (AMA.)
Soenen: When did you begin branching out?
Magee: In 1987, I left my surgical practice to become the Director of Provider Relations at Baystate Medical Center in Springfield, Massachusetts, and a Medical Editor at the NBC Affiliate, WWLP in Springfield.
Soenen: At what point in your life did you transition away from surgical practice into working for the pharmaceutical industry?
Magee: My careers in hospital management and medical communications continued side by side, and in 1991 we moved, now with four children, to the Philadelphia area where I became the Senior Vice President at Pennsylvania Hospital. In 1997, with now-extensive relationships with organized medicine, academia, and hospital associations, and experience in broadcast media, I was recruited as a senior executive by Pfizer CEO, Bill Steere, mainly to represent their new drug, Viagra, which was targeted for a 1998 launch.