Read Our Daily Meds: How The Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines And Hooked The Nation On Prescription Drugs (2008)
Our Daily Meds: How The Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines And Hooked The Nation On Prescription Drugs (2008) - Plot & Excerpts
When you boil it all down, this book was terrifying. You know all of the food books out that are making people take a second look at what they eat? I think books taking a closer look at drug companies should be the next big thing.There are so many aspects of this book that terrify me. I’m scared of how doctors are swayed into prescribing drugs for ailments they haven’t been tested for. I’m scared of how medicated kids are. I’m scared about people who drive under the influence of multiple prescription drugs and the people who die because of adverse reactions between two or more of their medications. I’m scared of antibiotics in our water supply. I could go on forever with this.While Petersen’s book points out a ton of really troubling issues, her conclusion offers some solid pointers for how people can become advocates for their own health. We grow up placing our trust in medical professionals, but sadly, we’re now in a place where even our trusted doctors are influenced by the fancy perks of helping out pharmaceutical companies. Patients should feel free to ask their doctors outright if they are on the payroll for any pharmaceutical company, and to get a second or third opinion. In the end, we can only be responsible for ourselves and our loved ones and hope that our pressure will create more effective checks and balances. It's been a long, long time since I felt so actively hostile toward a book and its author. I'm not sure why exactly that is. Rather, the reasons for hostility are so many and so varied I don't know if it's possible to sort them out. Mostly, I think that, as a person with a probably greater than average interest in non-pharmaceutical health-maintenance, I expected this book to be somewhat more solution-forward, rather than just a giant horror show of evil people concluding with 19 demands for government intervention. Petersen's writing is evocative, but her arguments are repetitive, lame, and inconclusive. As I finished the book this morning, one of the last stories she told was of the awful grief a woman felt when her sister died of cardiac events that may or may not have been caused by taking Vioxx. Vioxx was, in fact, pulled from the market several years after that particular death for increasing the chances of cardiac events. Petersen notes not the studies that led to the pull, but the original tests on humans which concluded--and she gives no notes on methodologies or error rates-- that 4 out of every 1000 people showed a cardiac event risk-increase. And that brought it all home for me. In Petersen's world, that 9,996 people might live decades of their life pain free cannot possibly make up for the 4 who may or may not experience greater risk for that greater benefit.Was the entire book written this way? No. Most of the stories were not about grieving siblings or family members. Most of the stories were about regular people who believed their doctors, or their televisions, or their Sunday circulars. But more than that, they were about people who were, UNIVERSALLY, too stupid to question any of those things. And those that weren't too stupid were proved, time and again, 1000% of the time, to be "old and frail" or "young and easily duped" such that, even those with brains enough to question their doctors, or Big Pharma, were so wholly without agency that bothering to do so would barely occur to them let alone be possible.Petersen didn't write a monograph. She raked a bunch of muck. For a book published in 2008, when almost nobody was ignorant of lifestyle diseases, lifestyle disease markers, or the contributions of things like environment, diet, and activity level to disease, she devotes two paragraphs to noting that many people wouldn't need medication if they changed their diet and increased their exercise. In fact, in the penultimate chapter, where she details a man whose Type II Diabetes medicine left him with a liver transplant, she actually says that most doctors will never tell their type 2 patients to change their diet or exercise because they assume they can't and they won't. On behalf of fat people everywhere, I call bullshit all over that, for all time.Nobody with basic reasoning skills thinks pills are magic, doctors are perfect, and pharma is altruistic. Nobody. Yet instead of taking a nuanced look at what the real problems were (obtuse regulation, off-label prescription, individual greed and apathy, to name but a few), Petersen wrote a book where ALL pharm employees are greed and evil, ALL doctors are craven and avaricious, and ALL Americans are stupid and lazy. Unless you'd really like to read about book about the worst way to package an argument such that your basic built-in audience has to disagree with you because you're so aggressively hostile, don't just pass. Run the other way and snatch it out of your friends' hands, like you would a purloined Adderall.p.s. I'm from Iowa, too. We are not, in fact, America's favorite grotesquely stupid sheeple.
What do You think about Our Daily Meds: How The Pharmaceutical Companies Transformed Themselves Into Slick Marketing Machines And Hooked The Nation On Prescription Drugs (2008)?
This was an eye-opening read for me on how the medical industry currently functions.
—MonsterGirl22
Good book, scary book. I'm not an alarmist, but this book is disturbing.
—char
A must read. Big Pharma is the 'war on drugs' we should be fighting.
—italia96
