Descripciones mejoradas de Syndetics:

Few people realize that prescription drugs have become a leading cause of death, disease, and disability. Adverse reactions to widely used drugs, such as psychotropics and birth control pills, as well as biologicals, result in FDA warnings against adverse reactions.

The Risks of Prescription Drugs describes how most drugs approved by the FDA are under-tested for adverse drug reactions, yet offer few new benefits. Drugs cause more than 2.2 million hospitalizations and 110,000 hospital-based deaths a year. Serious drug reactions at home or in nursing homes would significantly raise the total. Women, older people, and people with disabilities are least used in clinical trials and most affected.

Health policy experts Donald Light, Howard Brody, Peter Conrad, Allan Horwitz, and Cheryl Stults describe how current regulations reward drug companies to expand clinical risks and create new diseases so millions of patients are exposed to unnecessary risks, especially women and the elderly. They reward developing marginally better drugs rather than discovering breakthrough, life-saving drugs.

The Risks of Prescription Drugs tackles critical questions about the pharmaceutical industry and the privatization of risk. To what extent does the FDA protect the public from serious side effects and disasters? What is the effect of giving the private sector and markets a greater role and reducing public oversight? This volume considers whether current rules and incentives put patients' health at greater risk, the effect of the expansion of disease categories, the industry's justification of high U.S. prices, and the underlying shifts in the burden of risk borne by individuals in the world of pharmaceuticals. Chapters cover risks of statins for high cholesterol, SSRI drugs for depression and anxiety, and hormone replacement therapy for menopause. A final chapter outlines six changes to make drugs safer and more effective.

Suitable for courses on health and aging, gender, disability, and minority studies, this book identifies the Risk Proliferation Syndrome that maximizes the number of people exposed to these risks.

Additional Columbia / SSRC books on the privatization of risk and its implications for Americans:

Bailouts: Public Money, Private ProfitEdited by Robert E. Wright

Disaster and the Politics of InterventionEdited by Andrew Lakoff

Health at Risk: America's Ailing Health System-and How to Heal ItEdited by Jacob S. Hacker

Laid Off, Laid Low: Political and Economic Consequences of Employment InsecurityEdited by Katherine S. Newman

Pensions, Social Security, and the Privatization of RiskEdited by Mitchell A. Orenstein

Reseñas proporcionadas por Syndetics

CHOICE Review

The tenor of this work is evident in the first chapter, which finds fault with every participant having a role in prescription drug use--from pharmaceutical companies and their research, and sales reps and advertising, to doctors who are not adequately self-informed and who are overprescribing drugs. The list continues, as contributors discuss slanted articles and editorials in research journals and the FDA's insufficient staff to evaluate drugs. The faultfinding is impressive, though the book itself tends somewhat toward generalizations, opinions, and estimates mixed with facts. All the contributors are well qualified. After the first chapter, four others cover individual aspects of prescription drugs in more detail. An epilogue presents possible solutions to the problems discussed, but readers are left with some doubt as to whether these are real possibilities, given the magnitude of the faults identified. In view of the title of this work, some discussion of what level of risk might be acceptable with a given set of adverse drug reactions would have been appropriate. Another work that examines the same problems with a somewhat more balanced approach is Fred Pampel's Prescription Drugs (CH, Feb'11, 48-3037). Summing Up: Recommended. Lower-level undergraduates and above; general readers. R. S. Kowalczyk formerly, University of Michigan

Notas de autor provistas por Syndetics

Donald W. Light is professor of social medicine and comparative health care at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey and a senior visiting researcher at Princeton.