Health & Healthcare
Activist Interview: Elba Saavedra
Who is a comadre?
What role do Latino cultural values play in the Comadre a Comadre program?
What do we know about Latinas and:
Rates of mammography utilization?
Length of time to access care after abnormality is discovered?
Types of tumors they have?
Death rates due to cancer?
4. How does the Comadre a Comadre organization help women navigate the health care system?
5. Why does Elba Saavedra think it is good the women she works with move beyond the role of “passive patient”?
“They’ve Got a Pill for That: The Medicalization of Society”
What does “medicalization” mean?
What are some benefits of medicalization?
What are social problems?
What do critics of medicalization point out? What do they see as some of the downsides of medicalization?
Who are some of the key claims makers associated with medicalization?
What happened to guidelines about direct-to-consumer advertising in 1997?
What condition was Viagra originally designed to address? How did that change over time?
What was the process of and which parties were involved in medicalizing erectile dysfunction?
What are life-style drugs?
What is diagnostic expansion? What happens to the notion of normalcy?
How is the example of ISS an illustration of diagnostic expansion?
What does it mean to say that “pharmaceutical companies turn “difference into illness”?
Why is the author concerned with the diffusion of Western medical interpretations in other world regions?
Between 1987 and 1996, what happened to the use of psychotropic medications among youth?
What is “black box” warning? Why was it put on medications for youth?
Why can medicalization lead to increased medical costs?
How much money is estimated to be spent each year on unnecessary medical services?
What percentage of doctors have financial ties with a drug or medical device company?
What was the total of payments to doctors in 2013?
How does the pharmaceutical industry’s profit margin compare to other industries? What was the profit margin in 2013?
From 2000 to 2011, what percentage of new therapeutic products were directed toward diseases such as malaria and Ebola?
What is the relationship between ADHD drugs and school funding? Why is the author critical of the “failing schools” narrative to explain children’s medical conditions?
What connections does the author draw between standardized testing and ADHD rates? What was the rise in sales of stimulants after No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002?
How is homosexuality a model case of demedicalization? What happened in 1973 that signalled its demedicalization?
“Selling Sickness: How Drug Ads Changed Health Care”
Where does prescription drug spending rank in terms of overall health care costs? In the year before this chapter was written, Americans received how many prescriptions a year? How many did they receive in 1992?
In a decade and a half (1992-2008), how much did the use of prescription medication increase? How much has that added to our medical spending?
In the 1980s what did FDA regulations require in ads for medications? How did the Seldane campaign get around the 1980s regulations?How much do drug companies spend on ads today?
What did the 1997 FDA changes allow for?
On average, how many ads for drugs are aired every hour of every day on American tv?
How many consumers who’ve seen a drug ad talked to their doctor about it?
“Paying till It Hurts”
What is the annual health care bill for the U.S.?
How much do all colonoscopies cost each year in the U.S.?
How much of the nation’s GDP is spent on health care? How much more is that than most other developed countries?
How is the private fee-for-service system in the U.S. distinct from that in other industrialized nations? How do these other countries approach the rates for health care?
Why do insurers have little interest in bargaining forcefully with doctors, hospitals, and pharmacies?
If the American health care system were a true market, the increased volume of colonoscopies would have likely led to what?
What is an ambulatory surgery center? When they first came about, why were they seen as a cost saver?
Aside from gastroenterologists, what kind of doctor has a vested interest in performing colonoscopies in ambulatory surgical center?
“Big Pharma Comes of Age”
When did the pharmaceutical industry become the most profitable in the U.S.?
How much of the pharmaceutical industry’s spending is put into research and design? How much for marketing?
How much do American citizens spend per year on prescription drugs?
What atmosphere did the federal government promote in the 1980s?
What is lobbying? Where does pharma rank in terms of lobbying?
What did new laws allow federally funded researchers to do that they couldn’t do before? Why did that help pharma companies?
What did new laws allow companies to do in terms of drug patents?
What is a “me-too” drug? What percent of new drugs are “me-too” drugs?
How did the passage of the Medicare drug benefit program help pharma companies?
What restrictions do pharma companies put on university-based researchers in terms of publications?
What did researchers find out about the link between individuals who received pharma research money and authors of medical journal articles? Why did the FDA’s power decline?
What do pharma companies have to prove about the effectiveness of new drugs?
How much does the pharma industry spend for advertising per doctor per year?
Why is the example of high blood pressure and hypertensive disease relevant in this chapter? What is the example supposed to illustrate to us?
