Jeanne Lenzer is a freelance medical investigative journalist and former Knight Science Journalism fellow.  She is a frequent contributor to the BMJ (formerly British Medical Journal).  Her articles, reviews, and commentary have appeared in medical journals such as the BMJ, PLoS Medicine, and the Journal of Family Practice, and in the popular press, in The New Republic, Discover, Slate, The American Prospect, The Scientist, The (London) Independent, USA Today, Newsweek Japan, and Mother Jones.

Prior to working as a fulltime freelance journalist, Lenzer was a physician assistant in family medicine and later in emergency medicine.  She left clinical practice to write fulltime in 2001 when she found that marketing was too often trumping science – leading doctors and patients alike to insist on tests, medicines and surgeries that had little scientific evidence to support their use – and sometimes had substantial evidence of net harms. 

One of her first stories was about the promotion by the American Heart Association of the clot buster, tPA, for the treatment of acute stroke – after Genentech gave $11 million to the association.  After reporting the story in Mother Jones and the BMJ, the scandal received prominent media attention and her BMJ article became one of the most highly cited articles on the subject in the medical literature.  Since that time, Lenzer has focused much of her investigative work on the corruption of medical evidence due to financial conflicts of interest; data secrecy; media complicity with promotional messages, the failure of regulatory agencies to protect patients, and the plight of medical whistleblowers. 

In May 2005, Lenzer organized a roundtable of whistleblowers – including the FDA’s David Graham, who gained notoriety in 2004 after he blew the whistle on the FDA’s handling of the pain-killer Vioxx.   The roundtable proceedings were covered in the open-access journal, Public Library of Science – Medicine.  Lenzer, with her colleague Shannon Brownlee, has developed a contact list of independent experts from a variety of disciplines, for use by other journalists.  She gives talks on the interpretation of medical literature to physician and lay groups.