Prescribing by numbers: Drugs and the definition of disease.

"The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the emergence of a new model of chronic disease―diagnosed on the basis of numerical deviations rather than symptoms and treated on a preventive basis before any overt signs of illness develop―that arose in concert with a set of safe, effective, and highly marketable prescription drugs. Physician-historian Jeremy A. Greene examines the mechanisms by which drugs and chronic disease categories define one another within medical research, clinical practice, and pharmaceutical marketing, and he explores how this interaction has profoundly altered the experience, politics, ethics, and economy of health in late-twentieth-century America. His provocative analysis sheds light on the increasing presence of the subjectively healthy but highly medicated individual in the American medical landscape, suggesting how historical perspective can help to address the problems inherent in the program of pharmaceutical prevention" (publisher).