A comprehensive history of the concept of freedom of therapeutic choice in the United States that presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American policy and law from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Throughout American history, lawmakers have limited the range of treatments available to patients, often with the backing of the medical establishment. The country's history is also, however, brimming with social movements that have condemned such restrictions as violations of fundamental American liberties. This fierce conflict is one of the defining features of the social history of medicine in the United States. In Choose Your Medicine, Lewis A. Grossman presents a compelling look at how persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American health policy, law, and regulation from the Revolution through the Trump Era. Grossman grounds his analysis in historical examples ranging from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. He vividly describes how activists and lawyers have resisted a wide variety of legal constraints on therapeutic choice, including medical licensing statutes, FDA limitations on unapproved drugs and alternative remedies, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions against medical marijuana and physician-assisted suicide. Grossman also considers the relationship between these campaigns for desired treatments and widespread opposition to state-compelled health measures such as vaccines and face masks. From the streets of San Francisco to the US Supreme Court, Choose Your Medicine examines an underexplored theme of American history, politics, and law that is more relevant today than ever.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1881.

This volume of Osiris takes as its point of departure a simple premise: we have yet to fully flesh out the complex historical interplay between medicine and law across the globe. Therapeutic Properties takes an inventive look at the issue, presenting welcome insights on the worldwide ascendancy of biomedicine, the persistence of nonofficial and unorthodox approaches to healing, and the legal contexts that have served to shape these dynamics. The contributions draw upon source material from the Americas, Africa, Western Europe, the Caribbean, and Asia to trace the influence of penal and civil codes, courts and constitutions, and patents and intellectual properties on not only health practices but also the very foundations of state-sanctioned medicine. The authors explore, too, how institutions of global governance, including those underpinning empires and trade, have historically created feedback loops that enabled laws and regulatory regimes to spread, amplifying their effects and standardizing approaches to diseases, drugs, professions, personhood, and well-being along the way. Highlighting the payoff of interdisciplinary and transnational analyses, this volume adroitly teases apart how different actors fought to write the rules of global health, rendering certain approaches to life and death irrelevant and invisible, others pathological and punishable by law, and others still, normal and natural.

Law in a Therapeutic Key is an anthology of works written by authors from a variety of backgrounds. This book illustrates some of the best and most provocative new therapeutic jurisprudence work in fields ranging from mental health law to correctional law, criminal law, family and juvenile law, evidence law, labor arbitration law, and many more. "[A] rich compendium of the best of what David Wexler and Bruce Winick have wrought... a mature and reflective work, and the most comprehenisve treatment of the therapeutic paradigm to date." -- John Monahan, University of Virginia "The crucial insight embedded in these essays is that all law, ranging from contracts to criminal law, can promote or retard the psychological well-being of persons who become involved with the legal system. Unless we acknowledge these therapeutic considerations in the law-making process, we risk fostering individual--and therefore societal--dysfunction." -- Paul Appelbaum, University of Massachusetts Medical Center

"Doctors have been concerned with ethics since the earliest days of medical practice. Traditionally, medical practitioners have been expected to be motivated by a desire to help their patients. Ethical codes and systems, such as the Hippocratic Oath, have emphasised this. During the latter half of the 20th century, advances in medical science, in conjunction with social and political changes, meant that the accepted conventions of the doctor/patient relationship were increasingly being questioned. After the Nuremberg Trials, in which the crimes of Nazi doctors, among others, were exposed, it became clear that doctors cannot be assumed to be good simply by virtue of their profession. Not only this, but doctors who transgress moral boundaries can harm people in the most appalling ways"--

Medicine is a complex social institution which includes biomedical research, clinical practice, and the administration and organization of health care delivery. As such, it is amenable to analysis from a number of disciplines and directions. The present volume is composed of revised papers on the theme of "Responsibility in Health Care" presented at the Eleventh Trans Disciplinary Symposium on Philosophy and Medicine, which was held in Springfield, illinois on March 16-18, 1981. The collective focus of these essays is the clinical practice of medicine and the themes and issues related to questions of responsibility in that setting. Responsibility has three related dimensions which make it a suitable theme for an inquiry into clinical medicine: (a) an external dimension in legal and political analysis in which the State imposes penalties on individuals and groups and in which officials and governments are held accountable for policies; (b) an internal dimension in moral and ethical analysis in which individuals take into account the consequences of their actions and the criteria which bear upon their choices; and (c) a comprehensive dimension in social and cultural analysis in which values are ordered in the structure of a civilization ([8], p. 5). The title "Responsibility in Health Care" thus signifies a broad inquiry not only into the ethics of individual character and actions, but the moral foundations of the cultural, legal, political, and social context of health care generally.

Rare diseases collectively affect millions of Americans of all ages, but developing drugs and medical devices to prevent, diagnose, and treat these conditions is challenging. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) recommends implementing an integrated national strategy to promote rare diseases research and product development.

FDLI's popular reference book, A Practical Guide to FDA's Food and Drug Law and Regulation, Seventh Edition, provides an introduction to the laws and regulations governing development, marketing, and sale of FDA-regulated products, including topics on food, drugs, medical devices, biologics, dietary supplements, cosmetics, new animal drugs, cannabis, and tobacco and nicotine products. Structured to serve as a reference and as a teaching tool, the book offers practical legal and regulatory fundamentals, and each chapter builds sequentially from the last to provide an accessible overview of the key topics relevant to practitioners of food and drug law and regulation. This book is a standard legal text in law schools and graduate regulatory programs and has been cited as a reference in judicial opinions (including the U.S. Supreme Court). This Seventh Edition includes new sections on controlled substances, compounded drugs, and cannabis and cannabis-derived compounds. It also incorporates the latest amendments to the Federal Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act, as well as FDA regulations and guidances.

Essential, required reading for doctors and patients alike: A Pulitzer Prize-winning author and one of the world’s premiere cancer researchers reveals an urgent philosophy on the little-known principles that govern medicine—and how understanding these principles can empower us all. Over a decade ago, when Siddhartha Mukherjee was a young, exhausted, and isolated medical resident, he discovered a book that would forever change the way he understood the medical profession. The book, The Youngest Science, forced Dr. Mukherjee to ask himself an urgent, fundamental question: Is medicine a “science”? Sciences must have laws—statements of truth based on repeated experiments that describe some universal attribute of nature. But does medicine have laws like other sciences? Dr. Mukherjee has spent his career pondering this question—a question that would ultimately produce some of most serious thinking he would do around the tenets of his discipline—culminating in The Laws of Medicine. In this important treatise, he investigates the most perplexing and illuminating cases of his career that ultimately led him to identify the three key principles that govern medicine. Brimming with fascinating historical details and modern medical wonders, this important book is a fascinating glimpse into the struggles and Eureka! moments that people outside of the medical profession rarely see. Written with Dr. Mukherjee’s signature eloquence and passionate prose, The Laws of Medicine is a critical read, not just for those in the medical profession, but for everyone who is moved to better understand how their health and well-being is being treated. Ultimately, this book lays the groundwork for a new way of understanding medicine, now and into the future.