What Price Better Health?
Subtitle: Hazards of the Research Imperative (California/Milbank Books on Health and the Public, 9)
Edition: 1 edition
Publisher: University of California Press; Milbank Memorial Fund
Published: October 6, 2003
Language: eng
Format: Hardcover
Number of pages: 341
ISBN-13: 9780520227712
Subjects: Medical ethics; Medical research; Public health & preventive medicine; Public Affairs & Administration; Medicine; Health Care Delivery; Medical / Nursing; United States; Medical; Social aspects; Ethics; Medical / General; Political Science; General; Ethics, Research; Research
First sentence: Recent years have seen an almost unprecedented level of excitement about medical research.
Description: Medical research, with its power to attract money and political support, and its promise of cures for a wide range of medical burdens, has good and bad sides--which are often indistinguishable. In this book, the author teases out the distinctions and differences, revealing the difficulties that result when the research imperative is suffused with excessive zeal, adulterated by the profit motive, or used to justify cutting moral corners. Exploring the National Institutes of Health's annual budget, the inflated estimates of health care cost savings that result from research, the high prices charged by drug companies, the use and misuse of human subjects for medical testing, and the controversies surrounding human cloning and stem cell research, he clarifies the fine line between doing good and doing harm in the name of medical progress. His work shows that medical research must be understood in light of other social and economic needs and how even the research imperative, dedic.