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Over the past several decades, a gradual reduction in state funding has pressured patient groups into forming private-sector partnerships, raising an important ethical question: do these alliances ultimately lead to policies that are counter to the public interest? Health activist, scholar, and cancer survivor Sharon Batt examines the issue by investigating Canada’s breast cancer movement from 1990 to 2010. Health Advocacy, Inc. dissects the relationship between the companies that sell pharmaceuticals and the individuals who use them, drawing links between neoliberalism and corporate financing and the ensuing threat to the public health care system. Combining archival analysis, interviews with advocacy and industry representatives, and personal observation, Batt argues that the resulting power imbalance continues to challenge the groups’ ability to put patients’ interests ahead of those of the funders. A movement that once encouraged democratic participation in the development of health policy now eerily echoes the demands of the pharmaceutical industry. Batt’s thorough account of this shift defines the stakes of activism in public health today.
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Health activist, scholar, award-winning journalist, and cancer survivor Sharon Batt investigates the relationship between patient advocacy groups and the pharmaceutical industry as well as the contentious role of pharma funding. Over the past several decades, a gradual reduction in state funding has pressured patient groups into forming private-sector partnerships. This analysis of Canada’s breast cancer movement from 1990 to 2010 shows that the resulting power imbalance undermined the groups’ ability to put patients’ interests ahead of those of the funders. A movement that once encouraged democratic participation in the development of health policy now eerily echoes the demands of the pharmaceutical industry.
Countless public health agencies are trying to solve our most intractable public health problems -- among them, the obesity and opioid epidemics -- by partnering with corporations responsible for creating or exacerbating those problems. We are told industry must be part of the solution. But is it time to challenge the partnership paradigm and the popular narratives that sustain it? In The Perils of Partnership, Jonathan H. Marks argues that public-private partnerships and multi-stakeholder initiatives create "webs of influence" that undermine the integrity of public health agencies; distort public health research and policy; and reinforce the framing of public health problems and their solut...
In recent years, heated debate has surrounded the pharmaceutical industry and how it has gained unprecedented control over the evaluation, regulation, and promotion of its own products. As a result, drugs are produced, regulated, marketed, and used in ways that infiltrate many aspects of everyday life. The nature and extent of this infiltration, and how this has special meaning for women, are at the core of The Push to Prescribe. This is an essential resource for a variety of courses in Health Sciences, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacology, Public Policy, Public Health, Health Policy, Women's Studies, Women's Health, as well as many Social Science courses in areas like Sociology and Political Science. It will also be of interest to a general audience, health professional organizations, government health associations, and consumer and women's groups.
Each year hundreds of thousands of women are diagnosed with cancer, and more and more frequently, women are turning to alternative treatments to take control of their illnesses and their lives. Information, however, has been scarce for women navigating through conventional and unconventional medicine. Research funding continues to support traditional cancer therapies. Women Confront Cancer declares the need for new, less toxic therapies and diagnostic procedures. For the first time, Women Confront Cancer unites the voices of women leaders who have breast, cervical, ovarian, and other cancers. Documenting the decision process, the choices, and the dilemmas these women faced as they chose alte...
In this elegantly written inquiry into the function and purpose of illness, Duff reflects upon her own experience with Chronic Fatigue and Immune Dysfunction Syndrome (CFIDS) and offers a fresh perspective on recovery and healing. While we are conditioned to think of health as the norm, the author reveals that illness has its own geography, laws and commandments.
This thought-provoking volume compares the responses of women in a variety of countries and cultural settings to modern medical technologies. The contributors describe how women in East Africa deal with infertility, how American women respond to pre-natal diagnostic screening, how women in China and Japan choose to make use of reproductive technologies. The essays also explore wider themes, such as the emergence of the breast cancer movement, and how women confront environmental hazards which threaten them and their families. It is often assumed that women are passive in the face of biomedical technology, but this book shows that they make pragmatic choices, with responses ranging from acceptance to rejection or indifference. The reception of biomedical technology is situated in its local cultural contexts, and vital issues of women's health are related to political and ethnic concerns.
In 1984 the medical journal Obstetrics and Gynecology published a paper that would initiate an investigation into one of the greatest medical scandals of the late twentieth century. Titled "The Invasive Potential of Carcinoma in Situ of the Cervix", it discussed the results of an experiment that had been run at the National Women’s Hospital in Auckland, New Zealand, since 1955. The experiment looked at the natural history of cervical carcinoma in situ (CIS) – in other words, what happens if no treatment is initiated in a condition suspected (when the experiment began) to lead to cervical cancer. The paper divided participants into two groups, one that had negative results after biopsy or...
Women's breasts have been idealized as symbols of femininity and motherhood. They have held great social and psychological significance as objects drawing intrusive gazes, and as images of self worth to be measured against an idealized form. It is no wonder, then, that a technology emerged to alter and "enhance" their appearance. Nora Jacobson traces the hundred-year history of one such technology: breast implants. Organized both chronologically and thematically, this book examines the history of breast implant technology from 1895 to 1990, including the controversies that erupted in the early 1990s over the safety of the devices and the Food and Drug Administration's regulation of their use. Jacobson examines such topics as politics and bias in medical practice and the role of bureaucracies, corporations, and governments in establishing policy and regulating implant technology.