Therapeutic Analysis

When I first started out this class, my writing skill was a mess. In the past two months, I feel my writing skills had improved a little. This is probably one of the hardest classes I’ve taken mainly because of the formatting but it challenges me improved my writing skill. Starr is not an easy book to read, so it shaped me to critically think read between the lines of text. In the future, I’ll brainstorm and write an outline before typing out the paper and annotating what I’m reading. I find annotating and summarizing what I’m reading helps because I can go back to my notes and find what I’m looking for.
Therapeutics is essentially a branch of medicine that deals with specifically with treatments of diseases according to in-class discussion. Examples of therapeutics are physical therapy, alternative medicine, gene therapy, physiotherapy, and etcetera. The types of therapeutics that someone most likely encounters in the U.S are prescription and over the counter drugs. Prescriptions drugs require a physician’s note in order to access the medicine. Usually, with the prescriptions drugs, the physicians have the ability to control the treatment for the patient, which maintain their professional authority.
Comparing to over the counter drug, which is open to the general public, gives the power to the patient to choose his or her own treatment. An example of a counter drug is painkiller such as Advil. When purchasing the counter drug, the individual pays out of pocket versus prescriptions drugs are usually covered with co-payment depending on the insurance.
There is many roles corporation and industry groups’ play in the overall health care system: lobbying, marketing and supplying.
A lobbyist is hired by the corporation to protect the interest of the pharmaceutical industry. An example of lobbyist to get a patent for a drug so the competition can’t invent the same drug as the company is developing. Marketing is another role in the health care system. Advertising is the key to promoting a product. Once a consumer learns about a drug along with the symptom that is associated with the illness, they will consult with their doctors and might end up purchasing the drug. Lastly supplying is a role that the industry plays in the health care system. These industries supply with an innovated drugs that help keep human
alive. I do believe that corporations and industry have influences over how U.S Healthcare system works. The corporation in health care system started because medicine was profitable due to the development of medicine, so it “exceedingly attractive to investor and set in motion the formation of large-scale corporate enterprises” (Starr, 1982, 428). This indicates that the investor recognized the benefits and begun their way of entering medicine. There is a shift back to authority power between corporations and medical professions. From the previous chapter, the physicians rose to power because they were able to bring paycheck to the hospitals. As the growth of science and technology, it reduces the autonomy of medical professions because now the doctors are dependent on an organization such as corporations. According to Starr (1928), The increased power of the corporations over our health care system challenges the authority of the medical professions. Due to the advance medical technology demands large investments, the physicians lost control of their authority power. Due to influences of the cooperation, the change in physician’s preference when they prefer to enter group practices and participates in HMO’s (Starr, 1982). According to Starr (1982), prediction of the future, the corporate will have the final decision of how the hospital run.