Living Pharmaceutical Lives

Increasingly, pharmaceuticals are available as the solutions to a wide range of human health problems and health risks, minor and major. This book portrays how pharmaceutical use is, at once, a solution to, and a difficulty for, everyday life.
Exploring lived experiences of people at different stages of the life course and from different countries around the world, this collection highlights the benefits as well as the challenges of using medicines on an everyday basis. It raises questions about the expectations associated with the use of medications, the uncertainty about a condition or about the duration of a medicine regimen for it, the need to negotiate the stigma associated with a condition or a type of medicine, the need to access and pay for medicines and the need to schedule medicine use appropriately, and the need to manage medicines' effects and side effects. The chapters include original empirical research, literature review and theoretical analysis, and convey the sociological and phenomenological complexity of 'living pharmaceutical lives'.
This book is of interest to all those studying and researching social pharmacy and the sociology of health and illness.

Peri Ballantyne is Professor of the Department of Sociology, Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario, and adjunct Assistant Professor, Leslie Dan Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. A health sociologist, Peri has focused her research on employment and work as social determinants of health, and on pharmaceutical use across the life course. In her research, Peri seeks to make explicit the ways in which pharmaceuticals are subject to social, political and economic forces that influence who accesses them and to what outcome. Kath Ryan is Professor Emerita of the School of Pharmacy, University of Reading. She is an academic pharmacist and experienced qualitative researcher who has devoted her career, along with international colleagues, to the development of Social Pharmacy as a discipline for improved understanding of the use of medicines.

1.Introduction: Living pharmaceutical lives 2.Drugs at work: implicated in the making of the neoliberal worker 3.Medicine-use narratives on the margins: managing Type-2 diabetes without medical insurance 4.Medicine use for severe asthma: people's perspectives 5.Pregnancy, urinary tract infections and antibiotics: pre-natal attachment and competing health priorities 6."What the medications do is that lovely four-lettered word - hope": a phenomenological investigation of older people's lived experiences of medication use following cancer diagnosis 7.The paradox of vaccine hesitancy and refusal: public health and the moral work of motherhood 8.The pharmaceutical imaginary of heart disease: pleasant futures and problematic present 9.A Shot in the Dark? Ontario Girls, Informed Consent and HPV Vaccination 10.Reflections on the use of antiretroviral treatment among HIV+ men who have sex with men (MSM) in Nigeria 11.Opioid analgesics, stigma, shame and identity 12.The drama of medicines: narratives of living with Postural Tachycardia Syndrome 13.The (developing) pharmaceutical solution(s) to COVID-19: navigating global tensions around the distribution of therapeutics and vaccines 14.Conclusion: What of Pharmaceutical Lives?