ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines a less commonly discussed regulatory actor the legal system and court decisions on the appropriate use and funding of drugs. It looks at Viagra and how it has influenced the medical understandings of impotence and erectile dysfunction in Sweden. The book shows how the presence of an international drug can have implications for medical terminology and the colloquial use of words to describe a social and medical problem, even in a small, linguistically bounded community like Sweden. It traces debates around the introduction of alpha-blockers for benign prostate hyperplasia to the Swedish health care market and the shift in treatment methods they implied for an already medicalized condition. The book presents local examples of how the pharmaceutical products redefine existing health problems as issues with pharmaceutical solutions and how their presence frames the medical community's responses.
