Synopses & Reviews
Greg Critser's brilliantly incisive Generation Rx moves the conversation about prescription drugs to where it hits home: our own bodies. How, he asks, has "big pharma" created a nation of pharmaceutical tribes, each with its own unique beliefs, taboos, and brand loyalties? How have powerful chemical compounds for chronic diseases, once controlled by physicians, become substances we feel entitled to, whether we need them or not? How did we come to hate drug companies but love their pills?
Read on in Generation Rx for:
-- exclusive interviews with the strategists, scientists, and current and former heads of GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Merck, Roche, and more
-- a first-ever, inside look at the rollicking business story behind pharma's rise to power
-- the dramatic effects our drug culture is having on our major organs, from the liver to the heart to the brain
-- why old bodies and young bodies are the biggest, and riskiest, arenas for our great American prescription pill party
-- how the largely uncharted terrain of polypharmacy (various drugs taken together) has unleashed unanticipated, often deadly, consequences on unwitting patients
Generation Rx will make every American who has ever taken a prescription drug look anew at whats in our medicine cabinets, and why.
Review
'\"What Fast Food Nation did for the way Americans eat, Greg Critser does fo rth way we medicate ourselves.\" -Michael Pollan'
Review
'\"If a knowledgeable public is the key, this straightforward, highly readable book is a step in the right direction.\"'
Review
'\"Critser has a knack for turning the words of the pharmaceutical industry...against it, packing every page with enough \"Oh, wow!\" information to jade even the most hardened cynic.\"'
Review
'Reader\'s Prize 2005: \"While if may have been about time someone levied some harsh criticism against the pharmaceutical industry, Critser goes above and beyond the call of duty.\"'
Review
Finalist for the PEN Literary Award in Research Nonfiction
Review
"In this informed study, Critser sounds the impassioned alert that your medicine cabinet may be hazardous to your health." Library Journal Starred
"The saga of big pharma gives new meaning to the term '"slippery slope'...solid, thorough, and told with vigor." Philadelphia Weekly
"If a knowledgeable public is the key, this straightforward, highly readable book is a step in the right direction." Kirkus Reviews
"What Fast Food Nation did for the way Americans eat, Greg Critser does fo rth way we medicate ourselves." -Michael Pollan
"Provocative... he does a lucid job conveying the dramatic ways in which the development and marketing of pharmaceuticals have changed over the last two decades and the equally dramatic and often disturbing consequences of this phenomenon." The New York Times
"Critser has a knack for turning the words of the pharmaceutical industry...against it, packing every page with enough "Oh, wow!" information to jade even the most hardened cynic." Booklist, ALA, Starred Review
Reader's Prize 2005: "While if may have been about time someone levied some harsh criticism against the pharmaceutical industry, Critser goes above and beyond the call of duty." Elle
"Fascinating and disturbing." --New Scientist
"An unexpected delight . . . Critser spreads his gospel of rack and ruin in an almost good-natured way." The New York Times Book Review
"Worth reading closely...Generation Rx's cast of CEOs, marketers, researchers, and lobbyists reveals the quirky human side of big business." --Los Angeles
Finalist for the PEN Literary Award in Research Nonfiction
Synopsis
Greg Critser's brilliantly incisive Generation Rx shows how shockingly little we know about the prescription drugs we take and the hazards they may pose to our health. Americans are prescribed more drugs today than ever before, and the pharmaceutical industry has gained tremendous financial power and political clout. Drawing on exclusive access to the strategists, scientists, and current and former heads of GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Merck, and other drug giants, Critser chronicles the transformation of big pharma from onetime lumbering medical conglomerate to media-savvy consumer enterprise. He also reveals the direct and indirect consequences for our health, among them increased incidence of damage to major organs, unprecedented medication use by the very young and very old, and the emergence of polypharmacy, in which various drugs taken together can unleash unanticipated, and often deadly, effects.
Generation Rx urges all of us to think about the price we pay, as a society and with our own bodies, for our chronic use of prescription drugs.
Synopsis
Greg Critser's brilliantly incisive Generation Rx shows how shockingly little we know about the prescription drugs we take and the hazards they may pose to our health. Americans are prescribed more drugs today than ever before, and the pharmaceutical industry has gained tremendous financial power and political clout. Drawing on exclusive access to the strategists, scientists, and current and former heads of GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Merck, and other drug giants, Critser chronicles the transformation of big pharma from onetime lumbering medical conglomerate to media-savvy consumer enterprise. He also reveals the direct and indirect consequences for our health, among them increased incidence of damage to major organs, unprecedented medication use by the very young and very old, and the emergence of polypharmacy, in which various drugs taken together can unleash unanticipated, and often deadly, effects.
Generation Rx urges all of us to think about the price we pay, as a society and with our own bodies, for our chronic use of prescription drugs.
About the Author
GREG CRITSER is a longtime chronicler of the modern pharmaceutical industry and the politics of medicine. His columns and essays on the subject have appeared in Harper's Magazine, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, the L.A. Times, and elsewhere. Critser is the author of Fat Land: How Americans Became the Fattest People in the World (Houghton Mifflin), which the American Diabetes Association called "the definitive journalistic account of the modern obesity epidemic." He lives in Pasadena, California, with his wife, Antoinette Mongelli.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments : ix Introduction : 1
1. UNBOUND The Strange and Very American Liberation of Big Pharma 10
2. WE LOVE IT!
How the New Pharma Used Its New Muscle to Create a New . . . You 111
3. THE FULL PRICE What Living in Pharmas World Means for Our Bodies 170
4. THE END OF THE GREAT BUFFER? Why We Are More Vulnerable 220
5. INDEPENDENCE FOR GENERATION RX What Can Be Done 239
A Brief Guide to the Art of Taking Prescription Drugs : 257 Notes : 261 Index : 292