Petersen aims her barbs directly at Big Pharma, but the stories she tells about the companies’ relations with physicians and...
A no-punches-pulled indictment of the pharmaceutical industry in the United States.
Big Pharma has been making money but doing harm ever since it shifted a quarter-century ago from research to marketing, asserts Petersen, a business reporter for the New York Times. She paints a black-and-white portrait of drug companies as bad guys, obsessed with making money and willing to use shady, if not illegal means to do so. These “medicine merchants,” she charges, sell their products with slick television ads aimed at adults and appealing cartoon characters aimed at children; their advertising is ubiquitous, showing up everywhere from NASCAR races and state fairs to churches and spiritual guides. Big Pharma has gained unprecedented power over the practice of medicine, Petersen contends, spending enormous amounts of money to entice doctors into prescribing its products and turning medical continuing-education courses into virtual sales bazaars. The drug companies now have “a stranglehold on medical science.” They form alliances with universities; research studies are paid for by the industry; and articles and editorials ghostwritten by PR firms appear over the names of academics. Petersen names specific pharmaceutical companies, executives and drugs, devoting entire chapters to the marketing of Detrol, Ritalin, Neurontin and Zantac. The harm they do to the public is not just economic, she notes; Americans spend more on medical care than on housing or food, and the resulting over-medicalization poses health risks of its own. In addition, as companies concentrate on blockbuster lifestyle drugs like Viagra and copycat medications for chronic conditions (one more statin to lower cholesterol), much-needed drugs for rare diseases are not being developed.
Petersen aims her barbs directly at Big Pharma, but the stories she tells about the companies’ relations with physicians and scientists willing to be bought makes it clear that there’s plenty of blame to go around. For more specific information about the marketing of antidepressants, see Charles Barber’s forthcoming Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Medicated a Nation (2008).Pub Date: March 26, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-374-22827-9
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Sarah Crichton/Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2008
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and...
A dense, absorbing investigation into the medical community's exploitation of a dying woman and her family's struggle to salvage truth and dignity decades later.
In a well-paced, vibrant narrative, Popular Science contributor and Culture Dish blogger Skloot (Creative Writing/Univ. of Memphis) demonstrates that for every human cell put under a microscope, a complex life story is inexorably attached, to which doctors, researchers and laboratories have often been woefully insensitive and unaccountable. In 1951, Henrietta Lacks, an African-American mother of five, was diagnosed with what proved to be a fatal form of cervical cancer. At Johns Hopkins, the doctors harvested cells from her cervix without her permission and distributed them to labs around the globe, where they were multiplied and used for a diverse array of treatments. Known as HeLa cells, they became one of the world's most ubiquitous sources for medical research of everything from hormones, steroids and vitamins to gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, even the polio vaccine—all without the knowledge, must less consent, of the Lacks family. Skloot spent a decade interviewing every relative of Lacks she could find, excavating difficult memories and long-simmering outrage that had lay dormant since their loved one's sorrowful demise. Equal parts intimate biography and brutal clinical reportage, Skloot's graceful narrative adeptly navigates the wrenching Lack family recollections and the sobering, overarching realities of poverty and pre–civil-rights racism. The author's style is matched by a methodical scientific rigor and manifest expertise in the field.
Skloot's meticulous, riveting account strikes a humanistic balance between sociological history, venerable portraiture and Petri dish politics.Pub Date: Feb. 9, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-4000-5217-2
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.
A well-constructed critique of an economic system that, by the author’s account, is a driver of the world’s destruction.
Harvard Business School professor Henderson vigorously questions the bromide that “management’s only duty is to maximize shareholder value,” a notion advanced by Milton Friedman and accepted uncritically in business schools ever since. By that logic, writes the author, there is no reason why corporations should not fish out the oceans, raise drug prices, militate against public education (since it costs tax money), and otherwise behave ruinously and anti-socially. Many do, even though an alternative theory of business organization argues that corporations and society should enjoy a symbiotic relationship of mutual benefit, which includes corporate investment in what economists call public goods. Given that the history of humankind is “the story of our increasing ability to cooperate at larger and larger scales,” one would hope that in the face of environmental degradation and other threats, we might adopt the symbiotic model rather than the winner-take-all one. Problems abound, of course, including that of the “free rider,” the corporation that takes the benefits from collaborative agreements but does none of the work. Henderson examines case studies such as a large food company that emphasized environmentally responsible production and in turn built “purpose-led, sustainable living brands” and otherwise led the way in increasing shareholder value by reducing risk while building demand. The author argues that the “short-termism” that dominates corporate thinking needs to be adjusted to a longer view even though the larger problem might be better characterized as “failure of information.” Henderson closes with a set of prescriptions for bringing a more equitable economics to the personal level, one that, among other things, asks us to step outside routine—eat less meat, drive less—and become active in forcing corporations (and politicians) to be better citizens.
A readable, persuasive argument that our ways of doing business will have to change if we are to prosper—or even survive.Pub Date: May 1, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-5417-3015-1
Page Count: 336
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2020
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