When examining the function of medicine in the modern world, it is crucial to look at it in the context of what it is Thomas Szash called ‘therapeutic State’. In simplification, this concept defines a strategy of state-related and state-related institutions, which derive their legitimacy from providing wellness to citizens, and thus are curious in the medicalization of an ever-wide sphere of human life – the more behavior, medical states, ailments are regarded as a disease, the more opportunities for action and expansion of their influence and power are provided by wellness cameras. Drug use, cigaret smoking, excessive food, shoplifting, sexual behavior, racial bias, political views, mourning, shyness, civilian disobedience, suicide, pregnancy, birth, old age, death – virtually everything can be considered a illness or a symptom of illness. fresh diseases specified as chronic fatigue syndrome, social phobia, tiny breasts in women, sexual dysfunction, alopecia, fresh childhood diseases specified as “excitation” or a deficiency of attention are emerging.
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In a therapeutic state whose beginnings in the USA Thomas Szash involves the medicalization of birth in the form of hygienically motivated circumcision of male newborns, politicians and officials in scientists' kitsels specify what is simply a illness and what should be done to “fight it”. As he wrote Sheldon Richman in its article “Health is the wellness of government” Health is the wellness of the State, “Freedom Daily”, 2002), modern power is based on “the doctrine that all problems are wellness problems and all wellness problems are a substance of government”.
The politicalisation of health, the medicalisation of politics and social problems is growing, the state shows large interest in the concepts of illness and health, the state apparatus takes work for the wellness of citizens.
As Thomas Szash shows, since the 1950s, there has been a steady increase in state wellness spending in the United States – from 1960 to 1998 state spending on the head of the citizen increased more than a 100 times. The number of doctors is besides expanding and public wellness institutions are growing. Szash believes that there is simply a transformation of the U.S. from a constitutional republic to a therapeutic state, where medical symbols play the roles of patriotic symbols, and the regulation of law is replaced by the governments of medical power and "therapy". In the reverse, there is simply a long, social-inspired legitimacy of the social state, which is replaced by wellness and medical legitimacy. Here he comes, prophesied by Shash, “pharmacratic tyranny.”
For example, erstwhile president Bush's government decided in 2004 to recognise obesity as a disease, specified a decision immediately mobilizes the full state apparatus, as it concerns: education, prevention, monitoring, control, nutrition policy, therapies, regulations and regulations, wellness care, finance (tax issues, reimbursement of costs) etc. Obesity is no longer a individual substance of the individual, but is subject to State control and intervention.
It is even referred to as "the obesity epidemic". Although it is not a real epidemic, no virus has been discovered that causes obesity, but this is how it is to be treated.
– the language of the infectious illness model is utilized to describe the condition of the organism, clearly caused by factors mostly dependent on man himself (in the absence of an obesity virus in the defect always remains a "agent gene").
For example, different definitions of infectious diseases and measures taken to combat their ‘epidemics’ should be seen in the context of a therapeutic country for which a fresh infectious and infectious illness is an excellent pretext for expanding its power. But the therapeutic state remains closely linked to those who "produced and sold" therapies, namely the pharmaceutical industry. If a immense global aid strategy is built around an infectious disease, where beneficiaries are identifiable, and donors (taxpayers) anonymous, focused profits, distributed costs, socialised losses, then pharmaceutical corporations are, of course, beneficiaries – in addition to selling their products on the market, they receive immense orders from governments and another institutions and do not gotta worry about whether patients can afford medication.
From the point of view of the pharmaceutical corporation, a fresh illness means expanding the marketplace and fresh profits.
The interests of pharmaceutical companies coincide with the interests of public wellness bureaucracy, global and national institutions and organisations. "Big Therapeutic Government", "Big Biomedical Science" and "Big Business" form 1 large symbiotic strategy for which man is "a two-legged array of diagnosis", and technology-pharmacological medicine is simply a natural environment. They are jointly interested, as Thomas Szash put it, in the "unlimited supply of patients in request of assistance".
The basic fact must not be forgotten: for pharmaceutical companies, the marketplace is the body of a human being, as well as his mind, in so far as the head can be “treated” by pharmacological means. On the 1 hand, the body becomes owned by the state in a socialized strategy of medicine of the therapeutic state, while at the same time being leased by private pharmaceutical companies. They are, as are the officers of the therapeutic state, curious in the medicalisation of the largest area of the states of the human body and mind, as many human behaviors as possible. The greater the medicine of everyday life, the better for them. Their profits depend on the continuation and expansion of diseases.
So fresh diseases appear, simple ailments turn into medical problems, light symptoms into severe, life-threatening diseases. With the aid of friendly media that origin panic and hysteria about diseases, it creates the top degree of the phenomenon, expands illness limits to maximize possible markets. How they wrote Ray Moynihan, Iona Heath and David Henry in an article originally published in the British Medical diary in 2002 (‘Selling Sickness: the pharmaceutical manufacture and illness mongering’), “many money can be drawn from healthy people who think they are sick”.
The pharmaceutical business works just like any business – “making fresh needs and fresh desires” – in this case you gotta convince people that they are sick, and then you gotta buy a fresh medicine.
The large pharmaceutical business, which has become supranational since the invention of antibiotics (previously operated small, local, possibly national companies), is present 1 of the most profitable industries. It operates with standardized doses – regardless of where a sick or “disease” lives on the globe and who it is, the medicine is appropriate for it. The "pill for all ill" rule is the basis of its action. He is curious in medicine, in which laboratory tests based on statistical alternatively than absolute compatibility between test results and the abnormality in the body play a dominant role. This creates large markets, due to the fact that on the 1 hand the tests are becoming more and more perfect and they detect a "disease condition" in increasing groups of people, and on the another hand the level of any illness rate, specified as cholesterol, so that more and more people are considered sick and thus become customers of pharmaceutical companies.
Create a large global long-term drug marketplace – this is the main goal of the marketing strategy of pharmaceutical companies. This strategy is all subject to: testing, diagnosis, statistics, research, therapies, etc.
Thomas Szash writes that definitions of diseases and treatment are present controlled by a monopolistic alliance of medical establishment and state. This alliance consists of a 3rd coalition, i.e. pharmaceutical corporations, biopharmaceuticals, biotechnology, etc.
The above-mentioned authors of the British Medical diary wrote that a fresh “construction of disease” is being created from the point of view of pharmaceutical corporations, a structure that coincides with a structure produced by wellness bureaucracy. Pharmaceutical companies actively sponsor illness definitions and advance them both among doctors who prescribe medicines and among those who take them.
