Capital Pharmaceutical, medicalization and Invention Diseases

Capital Pharmaceutical, medicalization and Invention Diseases

Nildo Viana *

The process of medicalization of society has already been terminated a long time by social scientists and other researchers from the humanities. However, the medicalization process has been deepening, despite criticism, and professionals now from other areas, including medicine and biology, increase the number of critics. Simultaneously, the pharmaceutical capital, the most - but not only - interested in this medicalization process, reinforces their advertising strategies, its investment in research, not only in order to produce medicines, but also in order to produce new diseases. In this sense it was coined the term "disease mongering", or "inventing diseases."

The process of inventing diseases is already old and his classic example is psychiatry and "mental illness", that after the criticism became "mental disorders" and continue to exist and be reinforced by professionals of psychiatry and a huge help pharmaceutical capital . According to psychologist L. Kamin, Richard Lewontin biologist and geneticist S. Rose (1987), every ten years comes a new mental illness and a new remedy for it. The ideological source of this process lies in transforming what is psychic - something that is inorganic, mental, whose origin is social and / or behavioral character - in disease, that is, into something organically bounded would have "biological" origin (Szazs, 1979; Szazs, 1980; Viana, 2010). Thus, all coming out of socially imposed behavior pattern can be considered "abnormal" as opposed to "normal", including youth, political activists, among others. The ideology of normality / abnormality (Fromm, 1976; Horney, 1984) has a clear role to standardize social behavior and it uses a set of mechanisms, including the medicalization.

However, this process of inventing diseases expands more and is not just on the mind or behavior, but also for the body and this is seen in the disease character assignment for baldness, bringing, as a "solution" the "appropriate medicine", widely publicized by an extensive advertising campaign. However, the list is longer than you think: menopause, depression, etc., are "diseases" that need to be addressed. According to Moynihan and Kassels (2011):

The definitions of diseases are enlarged, but the causes of these supposed dysfunctions are instead described in the most summary way possible. In the universe of this type of marketing a greater health problem, such as cardiovascular disease, it can be considered narrow focus of the cholesterol level and blood pressure of a person. Prevention of hip fractures in the elderly is mixed up with the obsession with bone density of middle-aged women in good health. Personal distress result of a chemical imbalance in the brain serotonin.

The pharmacist capital generated the production of ideologies and financed research on another new disease, "female sexual dysfunction". Thus, the pharmaceutical capital, along with scientific research and oligopolistic media, advertising agencies, doctors, etc. invent fake diseases to cause medicalization and therefore expanding the consumer market for medicines, medical services, etc.

The goal of this, of course, is the expanded reproduction of the consumer market, natural consequence and logic of reproduction of capital. The logic of capitalist accumulation is the enlarged reproduction: d - m - d '- m - d' '- m - d' '' which means money-commodity-money, in which the capital invested through the exploitation of workers generates more money that is reinvested, increasing production, which still generates more money, which again is reinvested and so on. That means it is always necessary to increase production and, along with that, increase consumption. The reproduction of capital generates the need for expanded reproduction of the consumer merchant. The pharmacist capital, as well as the industrial capital and other capital sectors, produce more and need to sell more and more, that is, playing in a broad way the consumer market. Advertising is one of the strategies used, added to the power of persuasion of scientific research and medicine in a society increasingly "rationalized", or, in other words, subjected to instrumental reason.

The British magazine "British Medical Journal" reports and research Ray Moynihan and Barbara Mitzes, University of Newcastle (Australia), contained in the book "Fri, Lies and Pharmaceuticals", which denounces the production of a new disease by manipulating held by laboratory workers and "paid opinion leaders." Thus, the union of the advertising campaign of the pharmaceutical capital, more medical and scientific research funded by the same pharmacist capital, and reproduction in oligopolistic media, provide a process of inventing a new disease, the researchers and propagandists claim to be "generalized" and it is characterized as a "hypoactive sexual desire disorder." The researchers were employed or funded by the pharmaceutical capital. Other research, outside the pharmaceutical capital area, questioned the existence of supposed disease.

According to the study of Moynihan and Mintzes, the Pfizer funded courses for American doctors in the United States in which it put data on "invented disease" (63% of women would be to "sexual dysfunction") and the solution (" cure ") would be testosterone with Sildenafil (the active ingredient of Viagra, produced by the same laboratory), together with" behavior therapy ". In Germany, Boehringer Ingelheim, another great representative of the transnational pharmaceutical capital, announced the launch of the "desire of the drug," the Flibaserin, an antidepressant. However, the US drug control agency vetoed it and advised against the use of sildenafil.

However, the effect of advertising is devastating because it creates a need manufactured around a manufactured disease. In addition, female sexual dysfunction, when actually existing some sexual disinterest, is related to an organic problem, a disease, and its real origin is usually psychological and no use of medication use, not to mention the "side effects" of the same . The competitive society and forms of repression and social oppression, living with a time of "fight against empty" (Rojas, 1996), make room for the medicalization and invention of numerous diseases such as female sexual dysfunction, overactive bladder, depression, baldness and several others. Besides the side effects, the drug often generates what is supposed to combat:

"Selling diseases is done according to various marketing techniques, but the most widespread is the fear. To sell women the hormone replacement in menopausal period, if it brandishes fear of heart attack. To sell parents the idea that minor depression requires a heavy treatment, boasts up youth suicide. To sell drugs to lower cholesterol, talk of premature death. And yet, ironically, the very drugs that are exacerbated advertising objects sometimes cause the problems should avoid "(Moynihan and Cassels, 2011).

The hormone replacement therapy (HRT) increases the risk of heart attack among women; antidepressants appear to increase the risk of suicidal thinking among young people. At least one of the famous drugs to lower cholesterol was withdrawn because it had caused the death of "patients." In the most serious cases, the drug considered good to treat banal intestinal problems caused such constipation patients died. However, in this and other cases, national regulatory authorities seem more interested in protecting the profits of pharmaceutical companies than public health (Moynihan and Cassels, 2011).

 The result is labor camp for medical, profits for the pharmaceutical capital and imaginary invention of diseases whose treatment generates real diseases. Thus, the legal drugs now compete with illegal drugs, with the difference being that those who profit are others and their "target audience" is involuntary. Contemporary capitalism, led by a new regime of accumulation (Viana, 2009), creates an expanded reproduction of iatrogénèse diseases to resume concept of Ivan Illich (1980), the application of science as a destructive force, rather than productive.

The pharmacist capital and the medicalization of society are two things that go hand in hand and express a society "sick" in the sense that their reproduction is increasingly destructive, either by the dynamics of profit, is the psychic misery reigning in a society commercial, bureaucratic and competitive (Viana, 2008), based on the exploitation, domination and oppression, creating a futile way of life and the emptiness of those who overcame the struggle for basic needs, and poverty and hunger for millions who could not not even that.

The pharmacist capital is just another cog in the wheel of capitalism. And today, under the full regime of accumulation (Viana, 2009) and the constant need for expanded reproduction of the consumer market, it is necessary to expand the existence of diseases and the medicalization of society, including quickly and spare speed of consumption, and the same process that occurs today in the artistic sphere as in music where the phonographic capital accelerated the replacement of fashions.

Here just noted, again, everything was absorbed by capital, whose ultimate goal is to increase the surplus value production (exploration), which means profit, reproduction of capital and production increasingly intense of goods and, therefore, expanded reproduction of the consumer market and consumption. Matter who gets hurt, but not lack medicine to forget the pain.

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