Adriane Fugh-Berman, MD is a Professor of Pharmacology and Physiology with a joint appointment in the Department of Family Medicine at Georgetown University Medical Center. Dr. Fugh-Berman co-directs the M.S. program in Health and the Public Interest and directs PharmedOut, a GUMC research and education project that promotes rational prescribing, exposes the effect of pharmaceutical marketing on prescribing practices and has had a profound impact on prescribers’ perceptions of the adverse consequences of industry marketing.

Dr. Fugh-Berman has authored many key articles in peer-reviewed literature on the area of industry influence on medicine, including the first studies in the medical literature about how the pharmaceutical industry influences surgeons, pharmacists, basic scientists, and individual patients. Other key articles include the first comprehensive article on marketing messages in continuing medical education, including studies of messaging in CME on on short-acting opioids, fentanyl, binge-eating disorder, and hypoactive sexual desire disorder; a national survey of dentists attitudes about opioids, a study that shows that Medicare prescribers who accept industry gifts prescribe more medications (and more expensive medications), a review of how industry uses social psychology to manipulate physicians, an exposé of how ghostwritten articles in the medical literature were used to sell menopausal hormone therapy, an article about how “key opinion leaders” are used to market drugs off-label, an explanation of drug rep tactics, a national survey of industry interactions with family medicine residencies, and a study of the first educational activity that changed physicians’ perceptions about their own individual vulnerability to pharmaceutical marketing. Dr. Fugh-Berman lectures internationally and has appeared on 20/20, Nightline, the 1A, the Diane Rehm show, and every major television network.

Dr. Fugh-Berman is also an expert on botanical medicine and dietary supplements, and directs Georgetown’s Urban Herbs project, which maintains teaching gardens on campus that mix edible, medicinal, and ornamental plants, and demonstrate permaculture, xericulture, and ecological gardening concepts. She is the author of a clinical textbook, The 5-Minute Herb and Dietary Supplement Consult, and was the author of the first chapter on complementary medicine to appear in Harrison’s Textbook of Internal Medicine.

Previously, Dr. Fugh-Berman was a medical officer in the Contraception and Reproductive Health Branch of the National Institute for Child Health and Human Development, NIH. She has also worked with the nonprofit Reproductive Toxicology Center and edited an award-winning CME newsletter on women’s health. Dr. Fugh-Berman graduated from Georgetown University School of Medicine and completed a family medicine internship in the Residency Program in Social Medicine at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx.