: ''Big Pharma may also refer to the
pharmaceutical lobby
The pharmaceutical lobby refers to the representatives of pharmaceutical drug and biomedicine companies who engage in lobbying in favour of pharmaceutical companies and their products.
Political influence in the United States
The largest pharmace ...
.''
''Big Pharma: How the World's Biggest Drug Companies Control Illness'' is a 2006 book by British journalist Jacky Law. The book examines how major
pharmaceutical companies
The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...
determine which
health care
Health care or healthcare is the improvement of health via the prevention, diagnosis, treatment, amelioration or cure of disease, illness, injury, and other physical and mental impairments in people. Health care is delivered by health profe ...
problems are publicised and researched.
Outlining the history of the
pharmaceutical industry
The pharmaceutical industry discovers, develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceutical drugs for use as medications to be administered to patients (or self-administered), with the aim to cure them, vaccinate them, or alleviate symptoms. ...
, Law identifies what she says is the failure of a regulatory framework that assumes pharmaceutical companies always produce worthwhile products that society will want.
[
Law has written about healthcare for 25 years, seven of them as associate editor of ''Scrip Magazine'', a monthly magazine for the drugs industry.]
Reception
Ike Iheanacho writes about the book that "The author is clearly no great fan of the industry. But, refreshingly, she avoids the sort of lazy polemic that casts major pharmaceutical companies as an evil empire that continually foists its products on unwilling and unsuspecting healthcare professionals and patients."
See also
*'' Bad Pharma'' (2012) by Ben Goldacre
Ben Michael Goldacre (born 20 May 1974) is a British physician, academic and science writer. He is the first Bennett Professor of Evidence-Based Medicine and director of the Bennett Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Oxford ...
* ''Side Effects
In medicine, a side effect is an effect, whether therapeutic or adverse, that is secondary to the one intended; although the term is predominantly employed to describe adverse effects, it can also apply to beneficial, but unintended, consequence ...
'' (2008) by Alison Bass
Alison Bass is an American journalist and author of three books: her memoir, ''Brassy Broad: How one Journalist helped pave the way to #MeToo'' (2021); ''Getting Screwed: Sex Workers and the Law'' and ''Side Effects: A Prosecutor, A Whistleblower ...
* Lists about the pharmaceutical industry
These are Wikipedia lists about the pharmaceutical industry. The pharmaceutical industry develops, produces, and markets drugs or pharmaceuticals licensed for use as medications. Pharmaceutical companies are allowed to deal in generic or brand medi ...
References
External links
Excerpt from the book
{{DEFAULTSORT:Big Pharma
2006 non-fiction books
British non-fiction books
Medical books
Pharmaceutical industry