Main description:

Public Health, Personal Health and Pills explores the processes and effects of the increasing governance of our lives through pharmaceuticals, looking at the moral, interactional, social and political forces that shape our use of them. It demonstrates the ways in which social relationships and identities are developed, sustained and transformed through medication use.

Building on the extensive medicalisation of health literature, and the more recent concept of pharmaceuticalisation, this pioneering book is firmly based on empirical research and sociological theory. It brings together macro considerations of trends in pharmaceutical consumption, regulation and policy, micro considerations of the decision-making and the negotiation of medication use in homes and clinics, and an institutional analysis of the role of drug monitoring agencies, drug subsidising agencies, drug trial methodologies and the media.

This book is a contribution to a burgeoning sociological interest in medication use, and will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience of scholars and students of sociology, science and technology studies, pharmacy and health studies.

Contents:

Chapter 1. Orienting to pharmaceuticalised governance

Chapter 2. The Development pharmaceutical hegemony

Chapter 3. Expanding Medicine

Chapter 4. Moral forces and medicine

Chapter 5. Medication practices in the home

Chapter 6. Sources of practices and their contestation

Chapter 7. Populations and medications

Chapter 8. Adverse reactions and the proliferation of risk

Chapter 9. Underreporting of side effects

Chapter 10. Pharmacovigilance lessons

Chapter 11. Different faces of governance

Chapter 12. Resisting pharmaceuticalised governance

Chapter 13. Drug entanglements and governance