(Routledge Studies in the Sociology of Health and Illness) 1st Edition
by Kevin Dew (Author)
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.
