Ferguson A E
Cult Med Psychiatry. 1981 Jun;5(2):105-34. doi: 10.1007/BF00055416.
This study illustrates the impact of prepackaged pharmaceutical products, usually manufactured by multinational firms, on the health care sector of developing market economies. In many Third World countries Western biomedical practitioners do not exercise the degree of control over the use of one of their major healing resources, prescription medications, that is characteristic in most Western developed countries. Instead, these products have become integrated into healing strategies of alternative medical practitioners, giving rise to a popular sector of medical care, here termed to commercial pharmaceutical sector. In this context a form and process of medicalization has taken place which is only tangentially related to the presence of Western biomedical practitioners. A dependence has been created on a particular form of therapy, Western manufactured drug products, as well as on the agents and institutions that make the products available, that has produced cultural, social and clinical forms of commerciogenesis. These general propositions are examined in a case study of the impact of the pharmaceutical invasion of the health care sector in a Central American town.
本研究阐述了通常由跨国公司生产的预包装药品对发展中市场经济体医疗保健部门的影响。在许多第三世界国家，西方生物医学从业者对其主要治疗资源之一——处方药的使用，并未像大多数西方发达国家那样进行严格管控。相反，这些产品已融入替代医学从业者的治疗策略中，催生出一个广受欢迎的医疗保健领域，在此称为商业制药部门。在这种情况下，发生了一种医疗化的形式和过程，这与西方生物医学从业者的存在仅有间接关联。人们对一种特定的治疗形式——西方生产的药品，以及对提供这些药品的代理商和机构产生了依赖，进而产生了商业起源的文化、社会和临床形式。这些一般性命题将通过对中美洲一个城镇医疗保健部门药品入侵影响的案例研究进行检验。
