Yes - well, large pharmaceutical companies make a lot of money out of this.
Another example is the over prescription of Ritalin for children who are
diagnosed inaccurately with ADD. I've always been very chary about this
one: a child who's noisy, angry, disruptive, anxious &c may be so for many
reasons, but the solution is to drug him/her for behaviour control. How
much of that is a refusal to deal with the actual phenomena of children?
And what happens later to a child that's fed amphetamines through childhood?
Best
A
On 4/3/05 10:49 PM, "Richard Jeffrey Newman" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> It's not about romantic love, but in light of Alison's worry, look at what
> has happened with Viagra and other such drugs. There's a wonderful book
> called "A Mind Of Its Own"--the author's name escapes me now and I'm not
> where I can look it up easily--which is a cultural history of the penis. A
> large part of the last chapter is given over to how a marketing-driven,
> ever-widening definition of erectile dysfunction has precipitated not only
> the medicalization, but also a kind of industrialization of erections. The
> author's point is not that such drugs ought not to exist or that there
> aren't real conditions which they can and should be used to treat, but
> rather that the drug companies, in defining erectile dysfunction in such a
> way as to make almost any man who has even once not attained a full erection
> when he wanted to have sex feel like he ought to seek medical help (this may
> be a slight exaggeration on my part of what the author says), are
> pathologizing something that ought not to be pathologized. Another very
> interesting book that looks at the trend of pathologizing human experience
> and the attempt by government and other industries to bring what used to be
> the communal nature of much of that experience under institutional control,
> is Five Bodies--again, I cannot recall the author's name right now.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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