Broadcast Pharmaceutical Advertising in the United States: Primetime Pill Pushers

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How often do we stop to recognize what pharmaceutical advertisements are telling us Broadcast Pharmaceutical Advertising in the United States: Prime Time Pill Pushers engages with this question to include how pharmaceutical companies are shaping the meaning of drug interventions for individuals and the ways in which pharmaceutical advertisements frame issues of identity and representation for patients and health care. Such issues highlight how patients are being framed as consumers in these advertisements, which then permits the commodification of health care to be celebrated. Such a celebration has strong ideological implications, including definitions of the good life, patient agency, and the role of DTCAs in such depictions. By defining and discussing medicalization, pharmaceuticalization, and commodity fetishism, this book introduces how the term pharmaceutical fetishism can act as a means for describing the commodification of brand-name pharmaceutical drugs, which, via advertising and promotional culture, ignores large-scale production and for-profit motives of big pharma.

Reviews

The rise of direct-to-consumer-advertising of prescription drugs in the past two decades is a major engine driving the increased medicalization of human problems. Janelle Applequists book is an important analysis of how this has been accomplished and with what consequences for patients, medicine and society. -- Peter Conrad, Brandeis University
Applequist provocatively interrogates the characteristics and implications of DTC pharmaceutical advertising with multiple methods and a unique combination of traditional concepts and critical theory. A must-read for those interested in mediated health communication and promotion. -- Matthew P. McAllister, Pennsylvania State University
A tour de force. In her analysis of the evolution of direct to consumer pharmaceutical campaigns, Janelle Applequist deftly illustrates advertisings negative impact on the health culture of America. Moreover, this book is a most welcome example of - and testament to - the power of critical qualitative scholarship for the field of Health Communication and beyond. -- C. Michael Elavsky, Pennsylvania State University

Author Bio

Janelle Applequist is assistant professor at the University of South Florida in the Zimmerman School of Advertising & Mass Communications.