A big, sprawling, highly personal inquiry into the making,
approval, selling, and prescribing of drugs. When a single dose of
the antiobiotic Floxin sent Diane Fried to the emergency room in
delirium and left her with serious neurological problems, her
journalist husband turned his investigative eye on Floxin's safety.
It is a well-told story, fascinating and often frightening,
occupying nearly a third of this book. From it, Fried (Thing of
Beauty, 1993) then began a broader investigation into the
pharmaceutical-industrial complex, seeking to find the flaws in the
process by which drugs make it from pharmaceutical lab to family
medicine cabinet. Fried attended medical and scientific conferences
and government hearings, compiled enormous files of documents, and
seemingly interviewed just about anyone with anything pertinent or
interesting to tell him about the hazards of legal drugs:
researchers, pharmaceutical company reps, FDA officials, and
patients with adverse-reaction stories. Trying for the big picture,
he seems more often to resemble the blind men struggling to figure
out the nature of an elephant from its separate parts. While this
work lacks focus, Fried has an ingratiating personal style and he
provides some insightful interviews with insiders as well as
information on the safety of quinolones (the drug family embracing
Floxin), how the FDA dealt with thalidomide in the 1960s, the
development of powerful protease inhibitors to treat AIDs, and the
growth of direct-to-consumer marketing of prescription drugs. As
might be expected, pharmaceutical companies come in for heavy
criticism, but so does the federal government, for inadequacies in
surveillance of drugs for possible adverse affects once they're on
the market. To reassure the nervous consumer, there's an appendix
on how to read a drug package insert and how to ask the right
questions of one's physician and pharmacist. For all its virtues, a
collection of absorbing articles that never quite coalesces into a
cohesive whole. (Kirkus Reviews)
We take our medicines on faith. We assume our doctors are well-informed, our drug companies scrupulous, our FDA diligent--and our medications safe. All too often we're wrong. Just how wrong is documented in this critically acclaimed portrait of the international pharmaceutical industry by one of our most highly respected investigative journalists.
According to the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), adverse drug reactions are the fourth leading cause of death in America. Reactions to prescription and over-the-counter medications kill far more people annually than all illegal drug use combined.
Stephen Fried's wife took a pill for a minor infection--and ended up in the emergency room. Some drug reactions go away in a few hours or days. Diane's did not. This emotionally wrenching experience launched Fried into a five-year examination of the entire pharmaceutical industry, the most profitable legal business in the world. Rigorously documented, Bitter Pills is a full-scale portrait of pill making and pill taking in America today, presented through the powerful human drama of doctors, patients, drug companies, the FDA, and government regulators as they war for control of our medicine cabinets.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
