As Lake Superior University closes out 2006 with its list of banned words and phrases – those linguistic ticks that got too much media play in the past year – including the phrase “Ask your doctor” which it refers to as “The chewable vitamin morphine of marketing” The New York Times gives us something which I’d long suspected but could never prove:
For most Americans, the biggest health threat is not avian flu, West Nile or mad cow disease. It’s our health-care system.
You might think this is because doctors make mistakes (we do make mistakes). But you can’t be a victim of medical error if you are not in the system. The larger threat posed by American medicine is that more and more of us are being drawn into the system not because of an epidemic of disease, but because of an epidemic of diagnoses.
Essay authors H. Gilbert Welch, Lisa Schwartz And Steven Woloshin go on to write:
This epidemic is a threat to your health. It has two distinct sources. One is the medicalization of everyday life. Most of us experience physical or emotional sensations we don’t like, and in the past, this was considered a part of life. Increasingly, however, such sensations are considered symptoms of disease. Everyday experiences like insomnia, sadness, twitchy legs and impaired sex drive now become diagnoses: sleep disorder, depression, restless leg syndrome and sexual dysfunction.
Perhaps most worrisome is the medicalization of childhood. If children cough after exercising, they have asthma; if they have trouble reading, they are dyslexic; if they are unhappy, they are depressed; and if they alternate between unhappiness and liveliness, they have bipolar disorder. While these diagnoses may benefit the few with severe symptoms, one has to wonder about the effect on the many whose symptoms are mild, intermittent or transient.
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Most of us assume that all this additional diagnosis can only be beneficial. And some of it is. But at the extreme, the logic of early detection is absurd. If more than half of us are sick, what does it mean to be normal? Many more of us harbor “pre-disease” than will ever get disease, and all of us are “at risk.” The medicalization of everyday life is no less problematic. Exactly what are we doing to our children when 40 percent of summer campers are on one or more chronic prescription medications?
No one should take the process of making people into patients lightly. There are real drawbacks. Simply labeling people as diseased can make them feel anxious and vulnerable — a particular concern in children.
Having recently had my own run-in with the medical profession’s opaque manner in giving out information, it might be fair to say that I’m a little biased. But it’s hard not to be biased when in an hour of prime time television it’s possible to see up to half a dozen ads for drugs that you’re not quite sure what they do but you’re still left with the feeling that you really should “Ask your doctor.”
It hasn’t been that long since BigPharma turned menopause, a natural stage in a woman’s life, into a syndrome that requires treatment. How, then, do we reclaim our right to live our lives without the intervention of medicine into every minute of every day?
More pointedly, how to we break ourselves of the mindset, which is probably very distinctly an American trait, that unless we are perfectly comfortable all the time there must be something wrong…and there must be something we can do to correct the problem?
Cross posted in edited form to Amphetameme