Paper short abstract:

What kind of care do we associate with the prescription and use of pharmaceutical drugs? Is it really care? What then does 'care' mean?

Paper long abstract:

My intervention is about challenging the position that pharmaceutical drugs are often given by modern healthcare science as a technology of caregiving, especially in modern day society where almost every human condition is pharmaceucalised. Drawing from Biehl's statement about pharmaceutical drugs being often mistakenly considered forms of caregiving by modern healthcare science when they are not (2012: 251) I aim to present how instead pharmaceutical drugs can contribute to social injustice, perpetuating social and economic inequality in the very actions of their prescription and use, to offer 'care'. I ask us to carefully consider the kind of care we may associate with the prescription and use of pharmaceutical drugs, to pause a little and ask ourselves, "Is it really care?" What then does 'care' mean? Using ethnographic materials from other scholars, particularly in the discipline of anthropology, I position and argue ethnographic fieldwork and its tool as efficient methods that can be deployed to deliver evidence and conclusions that help challenge prevailing assumptions about pharmaceuticals.