Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies [9780618773565]

Overview

Greg Critser's brilliantly incisive Generation Rx moves the conversation about prescription drugs to where it hits home: our own bodies. How, he asks, has "big pharma" created a nation of pharmaceutical tribes, each with its own unique beliefs, taboos, and brand loyalties? How have powerful chemical compounds for chronic diseases, once controlled by physicians, become substances we feel entitled to, whether we need them or not? How did we come to hate drug companies but love their pills?

Read on in Generation Rx for:

—exclusive interviews with the strategists, scientists, and current and former heads of GlaxoSmithKline, Eli Lilly, Merck, Roche, and more

—a first-ever, inside look at the rollicking business story behind pharma's rise to power

—the dramatic effects our drug culture is having on our major organs, from the liver to the heart to the brain

—why old bodies and young bodies are the biggest, and riskiest, arenas for our great American prescription pill party

—how the largely uncharted terrain of polypharmacy (various drugs taken together) has unleashed unanticipated, often deadly, consequences on unwitting patients

Generation Rx will make every American who has ever taken a prescription drug look anew at what’s in our medicine cabinets, and why.