| Summary: | "Ghost-Managed Medicine by Sergio Sismondo explores a spectral side of medical knowledge, based in pharmaceutical industry tactics and practices. Hidden from the public view, the many invisible hands of the pharmaceutical industry and its agents channel streams of drug information and knowledge from contract research organizations (that extract data from experimental bodies) to publication planners (who produce ghostwritten medical journal articles) to key opinion leaders (who are sent out to educate physicians about drugs) to patient advocacy organizations (who ventriloquize views on diseases, treatments and regulations), and onward. The goal of this 'assemblage marketing' is to establish conditions that make specific diagnoses, prescriptions and purchases as obvious and frequent as possible. While staying in the shadows, companies create powerful markets in which increasing numbers of people become sick and the drugs largely sell themselves ... Ghost-Managed Medicine draws on presentations at industry conferences, especially ones where pharmaceutical companies interact with communication, marketing and other agencies. Participants at these interface conferences describe goals, practices and concerns; in the process, they reveal a lot about how the industry works. Some of the book's other data is taken from publications that also serve as interfaces between the industry and adjacent actors, and from interviews with people engaged in pharmaceutical marketing"--Publisher's description
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