Ebook Free Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures)
January 19, 2013Ebook Free Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures)
Become part of those that like to read this book. If you are the newbie viewers, you could use this publication as temptation for you to minimally love analysis. Also this publication is written by a professional author, it does not suggest that words are extremely challenging to understand. You could take some lessons and also experiences from Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) based on exactly what you need. This is exactly what calls as advantages of book by reading. Currently, get this publication here and right now. It will certainly be served in the site link to see.
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures)
Ebook Free Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures)
Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures). The established innovation, nowadays sustain every little thing the human demands. It consists of the daily tasks, jobs, workplace, home entertainment, and more. One of them is the excellent internet link and also computer system. This problem will alleviate you to sustain one of your hobbies, reviewing habit. So, do you have going to review this publication Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) now?
Nonetheless, nothing is difficult in this life. You can obtain just what you truly assume want to do and obtain for something brand-new. Nonetheless, the expectation of having great behavior will certainly have numerous challenges. However, to overcome the trouble, we provide you a recommendation to start caring reading.
Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) as one of the referred publications that we will certainly provide in this site has been checked out to be one valid source. Even this topic prevails, the means just how writer makes it is extremely attractive. It could draw in the people that have not feels for checking out to begin reading. It will make somebody keen on this publication to read. And also it will educate a person to make far better choice.
From the description above, it is clear that you have to review this publication Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) We provide the on-line e-book qualified Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) right below by clicking the web link download. From shared publication by on-line, you can give a lot more benefits for several people. Besides, the visitors will be also easily to obtain the preferred e-book Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) to review. Locate the most preferred as well as needed book Drugs For Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) to read now and also here.
Review
"Drugs for Life is simply superb, a major accomplishment in the study of pharmaceuticals and their expanding relation to life itself. There is no recent scholarly work that attempts or accomplishes what Joseph Dumit does here, tackling the relation between big pharma and clinical epistemology in such a comprehensive and satisfying way. He deftly links critical debates across the life and human sciences, making an important and compelling argument on a matter central to contemporary public debate."—Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things"Drugs for Life shocks the reader into seeing health, medicine, pharmaceuticals, and the pharmaceutical industry and drug research for what they are from a cultural standpoint: a new framing of the future world for all of us. And that future is now and troubling and transformative of human conditions. A remarkable contribution that will perturb and disturb professional and general readers."—Arthur Kleinman, coeditor of Global Pharmaceuticals: Ethics, Markets, Practices"In this provocative and important book, Joseph Dumit brings a new approach to bear on critiques of the pharmaceutical industry and U.S. healthcare. He marshals ethnographic research among drug company executives and marketing strategists, along with the analysis of scientific and popular representations of their products, showing how consumers have been tutored into a proactive stance toward health. Over the past few decades, we have come to live by 'the numbers' and 'risk factors' that make embracing lifelong pharmaceutical regimes seem like common sense. But is it? Dumit explores the pharmaceuticalization of American culture and consciousness with a light, accessible touch that belies the depth of his knowledge."—Rayna Rapp, author of Testing Women, Testing the Fetus: The Social Impact of Amniocentesis in America“A rich and valuable contribution to literature on medical ethics, cultural studies, and the sociology of medicine. Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates and above.” (A. W. Klink Choice)“Drugs for Life is a synthetic achievement. It captures a web of phenomena occurring in disparate spaces—clinical research, treatment guidelines, advertising practices, biotechnology investments—and shows how they interact to reconfigure our intuitive, personal sense of what health is and what living requires. For this reason, it is destined to enter the canon of science and technology studies.” (Helena Hansen American Ethnologist)“Although its topic is an abstract one, much of Drugs for Life consists of insightful readings of advertisements, of statements by marketers and of patients' accounts. Dumit has pulled together a tremendous number of telling arguments and phrases, and can be at his best when reading them.” (Sergio Sismondo Times Higher Education)“Thought-provoking and chilling. . . . All registered nurses would . . . benefit from his analysis." (Lucia Hwang National Nurse)“Dumit examines the role played by the pharmaceutical industry and the rise of evidence-based medicine, which have redefined the borders between sickness and health along statistical lines. Drugs for Life is recommended for anyone who has ever been told they're at risk for illness.” (Matt Savelli Chemical Heritage)“Drugs for Life is a brilliant and provocative analysis of the new cultural and business logics of science, medicalization, and the drug industry.” (Kristin Peterson Somatosphere)“Drugs for Life is one of the best among many recent works on the pharmaceutical industry, and certainly the most sophisticated by the standards of science and technology studies.” (Alasdair McMillan Science as Culture)
Read more
About the Author
Joseph Dumit is Director of Science and Technology Studies and Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of Picturing Personhood: Brain Scans and Biomedical Identity and editor, with Regula Valérie Burri, of Biomedicine as Culture: Instrumental Practices, Technoscientific Knowledge, and New Modes of Life.
Read more
Product details
Series: Experimental Futures
Paperback: 280 pages
Publisher: Duke University Press Books; 1 edition (September 3, 2012)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0822348713
ISBN-13: 978-0822348719
Product Dimensions:
6.2 x 0.8 x 9.2 inches
Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
4.3 out of 5 stars
9 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#665,385 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
A well written book that is a scholarly work. That says volumes for me. The book describes the culture of creating an artificial consensus about the entire structure of medicine, based on what pharmaceutical companies want to sell.Most devastating line in the book was the author's report of a pharmaceutical marketing executive stating the goal is to have everyone on at least 5 drugs for their lifetime. Thus the title: "Drugs for LIfe". We are not imagining that there is increasing influence on medical practice from big pharma. It's a feature, not a bug in their plans.
Anthropologist Joe Dumit has written one of the most important and radical (going to the heart of things) books about health, marketing, medical research, and the pharmaceutical industry in recent decades. It needs to be on the shelf of every follower of Angell, Abramson, Avorn, Greene, Cassels, Welch, Hadler, Healy, Brody, Conrad, Goldacre and all the other doctors, journalists and social scientists broadcasting wake-up calls about how our current social perspective on health has been hijacked and turned on its head. Even better than many of the others, Dumit explains how it came about that we no longer think of health as freedom from treatment, but think of health as getting treatment for asymptomatic risks that are somehow endangering our future. This new paradigm of health - permanent risk and permanent treatment - is a catastrophe, because we are, always, perpetually, at risk of dying, and therefore if research (by the ever-growing pharmaceutical industry) is directed at uncovering risks, it will always succeed and there will be no future but more life-long pill regimens, more self-diagnoses, more screens, more tests, more side effects, more false results, more expense, and much much more worry. And for what - precious little gain in longevity, symptom-free days, or genuine understanding of our minds and bodies. Seeing the obvious is the first step towards resistance and change, but we are deep in the pocket and it will be a long road out. Make your book club read this book!
Informative, good read.
Perfect
Although the book can sometimes feel a bit long and repetitive, the information it contains is an even-handed look at the reasons behind so many people in the West being put on preventive prescription medication.Since this is written by an Anthropologist, not a journalist or a doctor or pharmaceutical representative, it has neither an expose feeling to it nor a particular slant. It’s clear that the author originally was just looking at the culture surrounding healthcare, and the evidence led him down this path. Anyone who is familiar with Anthropology knows that Anthropologists are trained to attempt to avoid biases and just report what they see. Of course, everyone is human, and I definitely think that by the time Dumit finished his research he has formed an opinion that the reader can observe, however he does quite a good job of just presenting the facts.The book is divided into six chapters, plus an introduction and conclusion. The six chapters are: responding to facts, pharmaceutical witnessing and direct-to-consumer advertising, having to grow medicine, mass health: illness is a line you cross, moving the lines: deciding on thresholds, and knowing your numbers: pharmaceutical lifestyles. The book thus moves from the culture of facts and how we respond to them, to the business of pharmaceuticals, to how public health has impacted how we treat individual health, to how the individual health care consumer responds to the information they hear from all sides. Again, all of this is presented from an anthropological perspective. If a reader has not read an anthropology-research based book before, the way in which Dumit looks at the information may be a bit confusing or surprising at first, since it is more about culture, which may not be expected at first, given the title. However, the second chapter helps this perspective make sense, so even a reader new to this perspective will most likely be able to get into it.What Dumit’s investigations revealed was a cultural shift from treating an illness after it negatively impacts a person’s life to attempting to prevent illness. Whereas individual doctors may prefer prescribing lifestyle changes (work out more, eat differently, stress reduction), some doctors prefer being able to simply prescribe a drug and some groups of patients may prefer to keep their lifestyle and take a preventative drug. Similarly, the pharmaceutical industry sees preventative drugs that are taken by large groups of people with risk factors as a more monetarily sound investment than generating drugs for an illness that would be taken one-time or simply for the duration of the illness or just from the time of diagnosis to the end of the person’s life. Preventative drugs are prescribed to people who have risk factors for developing an illness, and they then must be taken every day. At the same time as these situations have developed, public health, since the 1970s, has started looking at groups of people at risk for developing a disease that would have a negative public health impact and advising that people with these risk factors be treated to prevent the disease from ever occurring. All of these factors have created the environment in which we now live in the United States where people who are not yet sick are still taking multiple prescription drugs to prevent their getting sick, often in spite of dealing with side effects.I think the book in general could be a bit better organized. My notes, although taken linearly, read as a bit disjointed, with some jumping around among different ideas. The overarching concepts are not laid out as clearly and succinctly in the book as they are in my review. Similarly, some concepts can be repeated a bit too often, leaving the reader feeling like they’ve read this before. Also, sometimes the book delves a bit too deeply into anthropological concepts and methods, given the fact that it is presented as a book for a layman. Finally, I feel the title of the book is a bit too click-baity. It reads as if it was written to sound much more controversial and attacking of the pharmaceutical industry than the book itself actually is. The title reads like the book will be a heavy-hitting expose, when really it is an even-handed piece of anthropology work.Overall, this book will appeal to anyone interested in how the United States health care culture has evolved to the point it is currently at in regards to prescribing so many drugs. The reader does not have to be a scientist or involved in medicine to understand the book, although portions of it may feel a bit repetitive or overly technical at times. Although the book could be a bit better organized, overall it presents a clear look into the culture of drug prescription in the United States, and I recommend it to anyone interested in that topic.Note: I received a free copy of this book in exchange for my honest review.
Wow was the book an eye opener. I always knew that pharmaceutical companies were for profit and have their own agendas but this book really shows how these companies are changing the way we look at health today. Dumit has really done his research in a wide variety of areas to give the reader an overall view of how pharmaceutical companies are working through marketing, clinical trials, and trying to get directly to patients to get people to take more pills. The part that bothered me the most was how Dumit shows that these companies seem to never consider what would be the best treatment but base every decision on how to get the most profit. It is a scary look at our healthcare system today and the constant push by these companies for more people to take more pills for as long as they can, even when there are side effects.I will say that I am not a science person so I found reading this book to be difficult at times. I struggled with some of the concepts Dumit talked about and found myself skimming through some parts. Dumit does make his points clear though about how their has been a shift in how we look at health during the last several years. I know that the next time I go to see my doctor I am going to be discussing with her the things I learned in this book and I hope it will help me to make better decisions about my own health in the future. I highly recommend this book to everyone, it is really an important subject that effects everyone sooner or later.
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) PDF
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) EPub
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) Doc
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) iBooks
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) rtf
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) Mobipocket
Drugs for Life: How Pharmaceutical Companies Define Our Health (Experimental Futures) Kindle
0 comments