Choose Your Medicine

Choose Your Medicine is the first comprehensive history of the concept of freedom of therapeutic choice in the United States. It draws on legal history and the history of medicine (as well as political, intellectual, cultural, and social history) to examine the ways that persistent but evolving notions of a right to therapeutic choice have affected American law, regulation, and policy from the country’s origins to the present. It describes social movements and legal efforts dedicated to resisting government measures denying individuals an unfettered choice among therapeutic products and methods. The targets of this activism have included, among others, state medical licensing statutes, FDA restrictions on the distribution of unapproved drugs, state and federal prohibitions against medical marijuana, formulary limitations in government insurance programs, abortion restrictions, and prohibitions on physician-assisted suicide. The narrative’s protagonists range from unschooled supporters of botanical medicine in the early nineteenth century to sophisticated cancer patient advocacy groups in the twenty-first. The book considers how all of these examples, taken together, fit within the broader development of the idea of freedom of therapeutic choice in American history and law.