Medicalization Pros And Cons

Medicalization Scams

No one prefers to be lied to, especially if it is about the health of yourself or your loved ones. Therefore, the relationship between doctors, patients, and healthcare representatives is so important. As patients, we expect our doctors and healthcare representatives to be truthful to us about diagnoses, need for treatments, and medication prescriptions. Patients seem to trust what their doctors say, blindly, but are they always being completely honest? The purpose of the medical field is to help and save patients, but people always seem to forget that they are also a business. Like all businesses, they seek to create a profit for their own benefit. To do this, they came up with the idea of disease mongering.

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The establishment and promotion of “female sexual dysfunction” (FSD) is one of the most known cases of disease mongering by the pharmaceutical industry. FSD is "persistent, recurrent problems with sexual response, desire, orgasm or pain — that distress you or strain your relationship with your partner — are known medically as female sexual dysfunction" (mayoclinic.org). This is very common, as it affects more than 40% of women from the ages 19 to 50 (Tiefer). The Female Sexual Dysfunction: A Case Study of Disease Mongering and Activist Resistance says that "In the 1980s, the nature of sex research and expertise began to shift as a new “sexual medicine” focused on function was created by urologists, insurance reimbursement programs, diagnostic technologies, science and medicine journalists, and, then, the pharmaceutical industry". New technology for measuring menstrual blood flow and nerve function were used to help exaggerate the severity of the diagnoses. The 1980s also had a deregulatory policy, which the pharmaceutical industry took advantage of. Using this, the industry began to introduce and publicize "lifestyle drugs". The media, which included science and medicine journals, played major roles in spreading awareness of the medical …show more content…
It "includes a combination of persistent problems, such as difficulty sustaining attention, hyperactivity and impulsive behavior" (mayoclinic.org). People with ADD may also "struggle with low self-esteem, troubled relationships and poor performance in school" or work (mayoclinic.org). These symptoms are never fully gone. The medication that was developed for ADD is "is Strattera® (atomoxetine hydrochloride), developed by Eli Lilly & Co. (Indianapolis, IN, USA) and approved in November 2002 by the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) for treating ADD in children, teens and, for the first time, adults" (Wolinsky). Though this medication was created for everyone experiencing ADD, the pharmaceutical industry decided to advertise to first-time adult patients by using the headline "Distracted? Disorganized? Frustrated? Modern Life or Adult ADD?" (Wolinsky). The pharmaceutical industry can convince adults that they have ADD because it is usually self- diagnosed. All the industry must do is advertise common symptoms to make adults think that they are

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