Generation RX - by Greg Critser (Paperback)

About the Book

Critser's brilliantly incisive "Generation Rx" shows how shockingly little people know about the prescription drugs they take. The book encourages every American who has ever taken a prescription drug to look anew at what's in the medicine cabinet, and why.

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

In this informed study, Critser sounds the impassioned alert that your medicine cabinet may be hazardous to your health. Library Journal Starred

The saga of big pharma gives new meaning to the term "slippery slope"...solid, thorough, and told with vigor.
Publishers Weekly

If a knowledgeable public is the key, this straightforward, highly readable book is a step in the right direction.
Kirkus Reviews

What Fast Food Nation did for the way Americans eat, Greg Critser does fo rth way we medicate ourselves.

-Michael Pollan

Provocative... he does a lucid job conveying the dramatic ways in which the development and marketing of pharmaceuticals have changed over the last two decades and the equally dramatic and often disturbing consequences of this phenomenon.
The New York Times

"Critser has a knack for turning the words of the pharmaceutical industry...against it, packing every page with enough "Oh, wow!" information to jade even the most hardened cynic." Booklist, ALA, Starred Review

Reader's Prize 2005: "While if may have been about time someone levied some harsh criticism against the pharmaceutical industry, Critser goes above and beyond the call of duty." Elle