Pharmaceuticals and Society

Critical Discourses and Debates

Bibliographic Data

ID7394145
AuthorsNicky Britten (0000-0002-7533-414X, Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, corresponding author)
Year2010
Volume32
Issue3
Pages505-506
Publication date2010-03-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueSociology of Health & Illness (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0141-9889 • E-ISSN: 1467-9566
PublisherWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/j.1467-9566.2009.01236_3.x
OpenAlexW1506894424
LanguageEN
Citations received21

S.J. Williams, J. Gabe and P. Davis ( eds ). Pharmaceuticals and Society: Critical Discourses and Debates . Chichester, West Sussex : Wiley-Blackwell 2009 viii+160 pp. £19.99 (pbk) ISBN 9781405190848 The publication of an SHI monograph provides the opportunity to overview a sociological field, and this one brings together a diverse range of contributions. Recent years have seen the publication of many popular and critical books about pharmaceuticals and the pharmaceutical industry, some of them written by clinical academics wanting to reach a wider audience. This monograph is thus a welcome sociological contribution to the field. Its editors have grouped the eleven chapters under four headings: medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation; regulation; consumption and consumerism; and expectations and innovation. Within these headings, authors have variously drawn from a range of sociological theories or none at all, including medicalisation, the sociology of interests, therapeutic citizenship, patient participation, Bourdieu’s theory of capital and the sociology of expectations. The most ambitious is John Abraham’s aim to explain a theoretically and empirically rigorous framework for pursuing questions about pharmaceuticals and society. He makes a strong case for using a realist sociology of scientific knowledge which includes a sociology of bias in science. He concludes that the regulation of pharmaceuticals fails to maximise the interests of patients and the public health, but that this failure is camouflaged by an ‘ideology of coincidence of interests’. Such an ideology is relevant to Kathryn Jones’ chapter on health consumer groups which examines the relationships between such groups and the pharmaceutical industry. On the basis of interviews with representatives of UK consumer groups, industry and other actors, as well as an analysis of company and consumer group websites, she concludes that while there is a lack of transparency about industry funding of consumer groups, industry has not captured the policy agenda of such groups. She does acknowledge that it is hard to judge if groups are more concerned about the availability of drugs than other interventions. This is an aspect of pharmaceuticalisation discussed in other chapters but not explicitly in Jones’. Simon Williams and colleagues examine the blurring of boundaries between the legitimate treatment of medical conditions and the use of pharmaceuticals as lifestyle drugs, and the three chapters about medicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation focus on the latter. Nick Fox and Katie Ward define the pharmaceuticalisation of domestic life as the inclusion of domestic space (such as the bedroom and the kitchen) as targets of pharmaceutical marketing and consumption. Another way of looking at the medical/lifestyle dichotomy is to distinguish between drugs taken voluntarily and those whose use is imposed or at least prescribed. Most of the book is concerned with the former, which means that questions of resistance to prescribed drugs are not explored except in Michael Barr and Diana Rose’s chapter about antidepressants. It also means that the ‘core business’ of pharmaceuticals, treatment of chronic disease over long periods of time, is not examined in this book in any detail. One exception is Fabian Cataldo’s chapter about accessing antiretroviral therapy (ART) in Brazil. He argues that universal access to ART in Brazil gives marginalised residents of favelas a rare sense of inclusion in the wider society, which he describes as therapeutic citizenship. Consumerism is examined in two chapters. Fiona Stevenson and colleagues examine the tension between pharmaceutical expertise and consumerism in the context of discussions between customers and pharmacists, and conclude that both pharmacists and their customers acknowledge the importance of pharmaceutical expertise. Another angle on consumer expertise is provided in Peter Conrad and Valerie Leiter’s chapter on marketing directly to consumers, in which they compare contemporary direct-to-consumer advertising (DTCA) of prescription medicines to the advertising of patent medicines in the nineteenth century. The readers of an edited book often have an advantage over its authors: they can see the links between chapters and the common threads running through diverse contributions. The book would have benefited from a final synthesis by the editors to bring these various strands together and to draw more general conclusions. For example, in what way does the neo liberal corporate bias responsible for faster approval of supposedly novel drugs, demonstrated by John Abraham, contribute to or reflect a more general process of pharmaceuticalisation? The two chapters examining future developments, in pharmacogenomics and regenerative medicine, could have addressed questions of pharmaceuticalisation. Equally, Steven Wainwright and colleagues’ exploration of the sociology of expectations and their Bourdieusian notion of expectational capital could have informed the chapters about lifestyle drugs. This is not to say that the authors should all have worked within a single framework, but that the editors could have drawn the strands together rather more. I was sorry that neither Jonathan Gabe nor Peter Davis contributed chapters of their own, given their own excellent work on the more macro sociological issues. What this book does offer is a smorgasbord of topics and conceptualisations, which forms a rich menu for readers wishing to sample sociological contributions to the field of pharmaceuticals and society

Citizenship · Consumerism · Critical theory · Field (mathematics · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Social science · Sociology · Sociology of religion · Law · Pharmaceutical industry and healthcare

Tools

Open DOISci-HubOpen Access