Medications as Social Phenomena
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article discusses medications as socially embedded phenomena, using the class of psychoactive medications as a primary example. The analytical perspective is systemic, constructivist, and critical. We suggest that the ‘rational use of drugs’ paradigm fails to appreciate various legitimate rationalities motivating medication usages and is therefore inadequate to understand the place of medications in society. Medications have complex life cycles, with diverse actors, social systems, and institutions determining who uses what medications, how, when and why. Such understanding permits analyzing medications simultaneously as entities and representations. We outline recent changes in usage patterns of psychoactive medications (notably prescriptions to children), in pharmaceutical marketing practices (notably direct-to-consumer advertising), and in the construction of knowledge about drugs (notably the role of the Internet in legitimating consumers’ viewpoints). These changes indicate that medication life cycles evolve and mutate with social and technological change. These life cycles are viewed, then, as systems – part of other social, cultural, and economic systems, themselves in constant change. This perspective provides fertile ground to raise several research questions in order to understand better the nature of medications, their effects, and their place in society.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it