Public Health, Personal Health and Pills: Drug Entanglements and Pharmaceuticalised Governance

Public Health, Personal Health and Pills explores the processes and effects of the increasing governance of our lives through pharmaceuticals, looking at the moral, interactional, social and political forces that shape our use of them. It demonstrates the ways in which social relationships and identities are developed, sustained and transformed through medication use.

Building on the extensive medicalisation of health literature, and the more recent concept of pharmaceuticalisation, this pioneering book is firmly based on empirical research and sociological theory. It brings together macro considerations of trends in pharmaceutical consumption, regulation and policy, micro considerations of the decision-making and the negotiation of medication use in homes and clinics, and an institutional analysis of the role of drug monitoring agencies, drug subsidising agencies, drug trial methodologies and the media.

This book is a contribution to a burgeoning sociological interest in medication use, and will be of interest to a multidisciplinary audience of scholars and students of sociology, science and technology studies, pharmacy and health studies.

Kevin Dew is a Professor of Sociology at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. He is a founding member of the Applied Research on Communication in Health (ARCH) Group. Current research activities include studies of interactions between health professionals and patients, cancer care decision-making in relation to health inequities and the social meanings of medications.