Generation Rx
How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies
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- 12,99 €
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- 12,99 €
Publisher Description
This in-depth look at the rise of Big Pharma and pill marketing is “a page-turner” (Booklist, starred review).
A finalist for a PEN America Literary Award for Research Nonfiction, this book takes a deep look at how the pharmaceutical industry—with some help from the medical and insurance fields and from American consumers themselves—has pushed its products, often at the expense of our health. Generation Rx reveals the roots of many of the widespread societal problems we face today, explaining how marketing efforts changed powerful chemical compounds for chronic diseases, once controlled by physicians, into substances we feel entitled to, whether we need them or not.
Using exclusive interviews with the strategists, scientists, and current and former heads of GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Merck, Roche, and more, the author of Fat Land presents a “fascinating and disturbing” story of business interests unleashed on an unsuspecting public, and a cultural shift that has caused lasting—and sometimes lethal—damage (New Scientist).
“What Fast Food Nation did for the way Americans eat, Greg Critser does for the way we medicate ourselves.” —Michael Pollan, bestselling author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
According to Critser, almost half of all Americans use a prescription drug daily; one in six take three or more. What are the possible consequences of the staggering recent growth in the use of such drugs? Journalist Critser (Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World) lays out the cautionary facts in exquisite detail. The saga of big pharma gives new meaning to the term "slippery slope": none of it could have happened, he says, absent Reaganite deregulatory fervor, which led to the taking of several bold risks, most of which were perceived in the 1980s, even by drug makers, to be "downright dangerous" including direct-to-consumer promotion (DTC) and the advent of off-label marketing drug manufacturers encouraging doctors to prescribe medications for maladies for which the FDA has not approved their use. Some of this territory about our growing dependence on prescription drugs and the impact of DTC advertising was covered last year by Marcia Angell and others, yet it's a story worth heeding again in the wake of the recent furor over Vioxx. Critser's account is solid, thorough and told with vigor.
