ABSTRACT
Increasingly, pharmaceuticals are available as the solutions to human health problems, health risks and the challenges of everyday life; increasingly, individuals are living their every day and every night lives as ‘pharmaceutical persons’. This collection presents original empirical research, literature review and theoretical analysis of pharmaceuticals as, at once, a solution to, and a problem for, everyday life. By reference to select social settings and interactional contexts, contributions to this collection convey the complexity of living pharmaceutical lives. By complexity, we refer to the benefits as well as the challenges of using medicines on an everyday basis, as these relate to the expectations associated with their use, the uncertainty about a condition or about the duration of a medicine regimen for it, the need to negotiate the stigma associated with a condition or a type of medicine, the challenges of accessing and paying for medicines and scheduling them into daily routines and the need to manage medicines’ effects and side effects. The emphasis is on the everyday life of the pharmaceutical user, and the social, cultural, and political contexts of medicine use.
