Archived news
28 March 2010: Media coverage: A pill for every ill?
UPDATED:
Professor Joan Busfield’s research on the expansion in medicine use has been published in Social Science & Medicine in March 2010. The paper documents the substantial increase in expenditure on drugs by the NHS in England (a 60% increase in real terms over the decade to 2006) whilst the number of prescribed medicines dispensed increased from an average of 8 per person in 1989 to 16.4 in 2008 – a doubling over twenty years, with annual increases now running at around 4–5 percent. Such increases are matched elsewhere.
The article calls into question the standard progressive view of this growth, and provides an alternative framework for understanding the expansion. It argues that whilst the pharmaceutical industry’s intensive marketing to medical professionals, its control over the science underpinning drug development and testing and its disease mongering are key aspects, doctors have not generally constrained the industry’s commercial power but for a variety of reasons have largely played the role of handmaiden to the expansion. Similarly the public have done little to hold back the industry’s expansionary pressure as increased expectations of health and the evolution of a consumerist ethos have encouraged medicine use. Nor have governments or insurance companies done much to constrain growth. The article concludes that the pharmaceutical industry has been a major influence on the expansion in medicine use and this influence has largely been unconstrained by other actors .
Media etc:
- 28 March 2010
- 29 March 2010