What are the politics of pain medicine? Today Karma Chavez talks with Scott Graham, director of the Scientific and Medical Communications Laboratory at UW-Milwaukee, about his book on the rhetoric of pain medicine and his forthcoming work on drug approval processes and big pharmacies.

Graham’s principal research expertise is in cross-domain scientific and medical communication, with particular emphases on expert and public stakeholder participation in science-policy deliberation, and catalyzing trans-disciplinary research aimed at addressing wicked health/environmental problems.

His recent book, The Politics of Pain Medicine: A Rhetorical-Ontological Inquiry chronicles three years of ethnographic research and nearly ten years archival research into interdisciplinary pain medicine and related public policy. He is working on a new book about conflicts of interest in the FDA’s drug approval process.