“Medicalization”: Profit and Behavior-Control

Thanks to the credulity and docility of the majority of Americans, Big Pharma has largely succeeded in medicalizing virtually every deviation from corporate-dictated, machine-like, behavioral uniformity.  In an era of expanding ignorance, fear sells–especially through meticulously crafted TV ads.  (“Ask your doctor if Viagra may be right for you.”)

The collusion between Big Pharma and its distributors (i.e., doctors), with its obviously huge profit-incentives, might also (generously) be called a folie-a-deux.  Within their shared “medical model,” physiological anomalies detected by high-radiation(!) CT body-scans may suggest certain lurking diseases (or even “pre-diseases”).  “Early Detection” may offer the option of preventive surgery–what physician Nortin Hadler has called Medical Malpractice Type 2 (the procedure was done perfectly but was unnecessary in the first place).  In terms of the likelihood that one may “get” a certain cancer or cardiac disease, one needs only to consult CDC statistics, keeping in mind that it is the absolute, not relative, risk that matters.

As to behavior and its non-conformist or eccentric irregularities, an oppressively unequal, even unlivable socio-economic system requires authoritarian sanctions to enforce compliance with assigned and mandated role-demands.  In the former Soviet Union, outspoken dissidents like the nuclear scientist Andrei Sakharov were “mentally ill” and therefore hospitalized for “treatment.”  In the U.S. today, an angry, rebellious adolescent is obviously suffering from “Oppositional Defiant Disorder,” and must be therefore treated without delay.  Or perhaps he/she, somewhat confused by the kaleidoscope of “gender-bending” on social media, may be suffering from “gender dysphoria”–which, if impatient parents want a quick-fix, can be “cured” by “gender-reassignment surgery” (and the post-operative, prolonged hormonal treatment required).

In recent decades, the brazenly dramatic increase in these and other diagnoses of children such as “autism spectrum” and “bipolar disorder,” should have caused decibel-deafening alarm bells at the FDA, ACLU, and children’s rights NGOs.  The rationale–that diagnostic criteria and acumen are simply more fine-tuned nowadays–seems all-too-transparent.  Of course, the for-profit medical industry, like others, seeks to maximize demand and profit, what anthropologist Howard F. Stein has termed “the sacred shrine of the bottom-line.”

Authoritarian control functions to reinforce the existing socio-economic system, in which individuals must conform to various role-obligations.  At work, “performance reviews” enforce obedience to the arbitrary demands of the owners of the workplace, who define the output required of one’s position.  Using surveillance tools, the corporation can detect and weed out signs of dissatisfaction or insubordination–thereby labeling and eliminating those who question the mandated role-obligation.

At home, one is a “husband” (etym. “house bondsman”?), whose role-obligations include certain “conjugal responsibilities.”  Medicalization of sexual “performance” was successfully achieved by the laboratory study Human Sexual Inadequacy (1970), written by Masters and Johnson, who also introduced the lucrative new occupation of “sex therapist.”  This celebrated team medicalized the female orgasm as the peak-resolution of arousability, which must be regularly discharged (for “hygienic” reasons).

The hapless male, possibly confronted with a grossly overweight, even unsightly female who has gone to seed because she has hubby “under contract,” finds himself suffering from a distressing condition termed Erectile Dysfunction Disorder (traditionally called impotence).  Nonetheless, such dysfunction may be partially ameliorated by couples-therapy and, of course, hazardous drugs such as Viagra.

In sum: In a system in which spouses (and children) are, to a significant degree, property, those who choose to enforce such role-obligations may have the power to do so.

Intellectual historian and psychoanalytic anthropologist, William Manson (Ph.D., Columbia) has published numerous scholarly books and papers, and is a longtime contributor to Dissident Voice. Read other articles by William.