Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern by Nancy Tomes

By Nancy Tomes

In a piece that spans the 20th century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular--and mostly unexamined--idea that during order to get strong wellbeing and fitness care, humans needs to discover ways to store for it. Remaking the yankee sufferer explores the results of the patron financial system and American drugs having come of age at the exact same time. Tracing the powerful improvement of advertisements, advertising, and public relatives in the scientific career and the big realm we now consider as "health care," Tomes considers what it potential to be a "good" sufferer. As she indicates, this background of the coevolution of drugs and patron tradition tells us a lot approximately our present drawback over health and wellbeing care within the usa. figuring out the place the procuring version got here from, why it used to be see you later resisted in medication, and why it eventually triumphed within the overdue 20th century is helping clarify why, regardless of awesome adjustments that appear to empower sufferers, such a lot of american citizens stay unsatisfied and harassed approximately their prestige as sufferers this present day.

Show description

By Nancy Tomes

In a piece that spans the 20th century, Nancy Tomes questions the popular--and mostly unexamined--idea that during order to get strong wellbeing and fitness care, humans needs to discover ways to store for it. Remaking the yankee sufferer explores the results of the patron financial system and American drugs having come of age at the exact same time. Tracing the powerful improvement of advertisements, advertising, and public relatives in the scientific career and the big realm we now consider as "health care," Tomes considers what it potential to be a "good" sufferer. As she indicates, this background of the coevolution of drugs and patron tradition tells us a lot approximately our present drawback over health and wellbeing care within the usa. figuring out the place the procuring version got here from, why it used to be see you later resisted in medication, and why it eventually triumphed within the overdue 20th century is helping clarify why, regardless of awesome adjustments that appear to empower sufferers, such a lot of american citizens stay unsatisfied and harassed approximately their prestige as sufferers this present day.

Show description

Read or Download Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers PDF

Best health policy books

How Fat Works

An experimental pathologist and molecular geneticist, Philip wooden makes use of gene-knockout expertise to review the best way mouse genes control the metabolism of fat—research that gives insights into the workings of fatty-acid metabolism in people and what can occur while that metabolic stability is going awry.

Disentitlement?: The Threats Facing Our Public Health Care Programs and a Rights-Based Response

No built country is based completely at the inner most area to finance wellbeing and fitness deal with electorate. This booklet starts by means of exploring the deficiencies in inner most medical health insurance that account for this. It then recounts the background and examines the criminal personality of America's public health and wellbeing care entitlements - Medicare, Medicaid, and tax subsidies for employment-related healthiness advantages.

Immunization Safety Review: Vaccinations and Sudden Unexpected Death in Infancy

With present options calling for babies to obtain a number of doses of vaccines in the course of their first yr of lifestyles and with surprising boy or girl dying syndrome (SIDS) the main common reason behind dying through the publish neonatal interval, it is very important reply to matters that vaccination may perhaps play a task in surprising unforeseen baby demise.

Monitoring HIV Care in the United States: A Strategy for Generating National Estimates of HIV Care and Coverage

Nearly 1. 2 million humans within the usa reside with HIV, and the quantity grows every year. In July 2010, the government published the nationwide HIV/AIDS process (NHAS), aimed toward decreasing HIV transmission, expanding entry to care, enhancing health and wellbeing results, and lowering health and wellbeing disparities for individuals dwelling with HIV.

Additional info for Remaking the American Patient: How Madison Avenue and Modern Medicine Turned Patients into Consumers

Example text

19 Finally, in exploring the history of the patient as watchdog, I have remained acutely aware of the story’s relevance to present-­day controversies. Questions about how much market thinking should be encouraged in American medicine and how much protection and guidance patient-­consumers need in making medical choices are central to the highly polarized and partisan debate currently raging in the United States. The book’s conclusion lays out some historical insights that might be useful to today’s patients, physicians, and patient advocates.

The post–World War II perception of a transition from a “class society” where only a few enjoyed the best medical care to a “mass society” where all Americans had access to lifesaving goods lent the ideals of medical consumerism new force. Many Americans wanted to believe what Miriam Bredow wrote in her 1943 handbook for medical secretaries: “In a doctor’s office people are perhaps more nearly equal than anywhere else in the world. ”13 In the 1960s, this aspiration to medical democracy opened up opportunities for groups outside the new middle classes, most notably in the labor and civil rights movements, to lodge their own complaints about the inequities of the health care system.

17 Departures from the traditional rule of caveat emptor likewise applied to the sale of potentially dangerous drugs. Dating back to medieval times, the handling of substances that could kill or maim humans and animals had been subject to special care. Even with the legal embrace of free trade, special precautions continued to govern the sale of poisons, especially after several high-­profile murders were committed using arsenic and other poisons freely available from grocers and druggists. After the British Parliament passed the 1851 Arsenic Act to regulate its sale, many American states followed suit, passing statutes instituting special precautions for the sale of poisons.

Download PDF sample

Rated 4.60 of 5 – based on 47 votes