The political economy and everyday life of pharmaceuticals

Five years of features:
http://somatosphere.net/2013/09/five-years-of-features.html

The pharmaceutical industry is less about medicine than about money and is not a patient’s benefactor as much as their rapist.  It seems the profit motive would encourage this industry to find and develop better and better drugs, but these companies are trying to skip the hard work of science and pursue pure profit in itself through all kinds of corrupt, though not illegal, methods and maneuverings.  The needs and suffering of patients are held hostage by pharmaceutical stock prices.

In what follows we list a selection (though certainly not all) of these posts from the past five years.  They range from research and fieldwork reports, to thought pieces, to engagements with contemporary events, to syllabi, and interviews.

• Eugene Raikhel, Grandma’s Little Helper
• Kalman Applbaum, The Colonization of Pharmaceutical Science by Marketing
• Kalman Applbaum, Pharmaceutical Marketing, Capitalism, and Medicine: A Primer (Part I, Part II, Part III)
• Eugene Raikhel, The Prevalent Placebo
• Eugene Raikhel, Moving Beyond Race in Pharmacogenomics?
• Kalman Applbaum, Cases for Overhauling Pharmaceutical Governance
• Kalman Applbaum, Warning Label Spin: Further Reflections on What the FDA is Up Against
• Kalman Applbaum, PDUFA, Drug Safety, and Marketing
• Kalman Applbaum, Pharmaceutical Marketing and Abstraction of Consumer Needs
• Kalman Applbaum, Pharmaceutical Branding is Just Getting Started (Part I, Part II)
• Kalman Applbaum, Four Good Questions about Pharmaceutical Industry Reform
• Roberto Abadie, Exotic Guinea Pigs at Home: An Ethnography of Professional Research Subjects in the US
• Liz Oloft, Prozac in the Closet
• Liz Oloft, Learning to Love Meds: Americans’ Attitudes to Psych Meds may have Improved Since Late 90s
• Kalman Applbaum, Clean Pharma Crusader: Senator Chuck Grassley’s Enigmatic Campaign to Combat Rising Healthcare Costs
• Carl Elliott, A Psychiatric Research Scandal and an Accidental Activist
• Tazin Karim, Meducating Our Children: The Moral Influence of Adderall on Education, Parenting, and Treatment