Adam Tanner (1)

Tries to be both a human interest story and a history report or something, but doesn't really manage either. The author peppers these random details in about the lives of the various people that he writes about, but those details don't seem to exist for any particular reason. Why does it matter that some random woman was in the same graduating class as a famous movie star? Why does it matter that this business executive was closeted? There never seems to be any connection to all of this, which makes a lot of what is being said feel distracting and unnecessary. The facts of the industry itself are a little more cohesive but they also don't seem to connect to a thesis, and sometimes fail to present information that feels substantial rather than general. The book lacks analysis. Yeah, there does appear to be something of a point, but I couldn't help but feel like I was reading a lot of padding as I went through, like this is a long form article that was beaten into the length of a book. At one point I read the sentence, "Knowledge couplers were at the heart of his company," and thinking that I had missed something went back to find out what knowledge couplers were. Then I read forward, and then I checked the index, where this sentence is the only reference cited. What are knowledge couplers? I still don't know.

Weird stuff like this is common in the book. After getting almost all the way through I realized that the information I was getting out of it was actually very shallow, and the author's inability to write forcefully, or make strong arguments, made even the small moments of insight bland and difficult to spot. A disappointing book.… (mehr)

Is there a cognitive dissonance between the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996 (Hipaa), a federal law designed by the Legislator to safeguard the privacy of the American Citizen's medical information and the grand computerized bazaar that healthcare, health insurance, medicine.doctors and the distribution of pharmaceutical products has become?

The historical approach of author Adam Tanner is attractively narrated and will pull you in even if you are remotely interested in 1960's New-York "med men" advertising history.

As computers become more sophisticated in data mining capabilities, investors created companies that thrive on automatizing this collection process to reach the level of "big data". The question remains to be answered whether this industry benefits the patient when mapping prescription drugs and if it really advances research and medicine. Or is profit for its shareholders its finality.
Is the anonymity of your prescription drug really safeguarded by simply not disclosing your name to the data company? Can your patient profile be reconstructed - albeit without your name - by gathering data on which social platforms you frequent as a pharmacist, physician, dentist, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst or hospital client? I found this book describing well this environment without partisanship opting more for an objective approach letting the reader decide in view of the facts.… (mehr)