[responding to the whole post, really, but didn't see the point in keeping the whole thing.]
I don't find anything in your post to take issue with, really. I just am not sure I understand the point. I thought we had known a lot of this for a long time (probably I am thinking of when the material cited here first came out, but in principle we had this idea, anyway, I think). I thought Carrol's point was that these products and their lines of variegation are not in principle any different from other products. That sounds right to me, particularly as it was in response to your point about essentially fake "research" and the marketing of "new" drugs.
Clearly pharmas are hitting the scene from both sides: market direct to ignorant (not meaning this pejoratively) consumers, whom you lead to believe that you have the cure for what may or may not ail them, and market to doctors, whom you lead to believe they are doing the best for their patients.
This is bad. It is a bad way of doing things.
For the sake of clarity, let me repeat: this is bad.
What I want to know is what her solution is. So far, it has sounded like the gist of the argument is, "pharmas are motivated by profit, therefore their drugs don't work but get prescribed anyway. It follows further that pharmas ought to be done away with altogether, and especially their serotonin drugs."
I don't think we would disagree that profit as a motive here distorts everyone's sense of the good they might be doing. What I'm really saying is that profit as a motive doesn't mean that drugs like SSRIs can't be helpful for a lot of people, and indeed that they *are* helpful for a lot of people (this is what I mean by them "working"). So to toss SSRIs, say, seems to me like throwing out the baby with the bathwater, a horrible image in lots of ways, but it's the one that occurs to me. It's not a question of trusting pharmas. It's simply a matter of recognizing that even in what is a racket, it precisely doesn't require nefarious motives or some X-Files conspiracy (I miss the X-Files, btw) for capitalism to work its magic here.
How much does Petersen deal comparatively with non-US healthcare? Comparing, say, to Canada or the UK, where there is more or less fully nationalized health care?
I know this thread seems dead, so no worries if there's no interest in picking it up.
j