Description:
Cancer, Radiation Therapy, and the Market shows how the radiation therapy specialty in the United States (later called radiation oncology) co-evolved with its device industry throughout the twentieth-century. Academic engineers and physicians acquired financing to develop increasingly powerful radiation devices, initiated companies to manufacture the devices competitively and designed hospital and freestanding procedure units to utilize them. In the process they incorporated market strategies into medical organization and practice. This provocative inquiry concludes that public health policy needs to re-evaluate market-driven high-tech medicine and build evidence-based health care systems.
Review Quotes:
"Do commercials for Gamma Knife, proton therapy and other types of radiosurgery for cancer fill you will both hope and trepidation? If so, you should read Cancer, Radiation Therapy, and the Market. Barbara Bridgman Perkins has written a wise and fastidiously-researched history of radiation oncology that explores the intersection of big business, the zeal to cure cancer and the unending allure of the x-ray."
Barron H. Lerner, Author of The Breast Cancer Wars: Hope, Fear and the Pursuit of a Cure in Twentieth-Century America and