Jörg Blech: Inventing Disease and Pushing Pills. Routledge
Most of us are probably familiar with the idea of companies creating a market and a demand for their products: advertising toys to kids would be an obvious example. How this kind of thing is put into effect will naturally vary according to the industry in which a particular company operates. A pharmaceutical concern, for instance, may need to convince people not just that their product will cure a particular disease but that they quite probably suffer from this disease in the first place and so need curing. This is the kind of thing that Jurg Blech chronicles in this informative book.
Thus diseases are invented, people are given unnecessary check-ups, and good health is turned into a virtually unattainable state. Normal life processes, such as hair loss, are argued to be medical problems, and slight symptoms like irritable bowel syndrome are sold as serious disorders. Disease awareness campaigns are set up to publicise a 'disease' which people may be unaware they are suffering from. Almost everyone can be categorised as unwell in some way if the criteria for health are redefined at will. The companies that make the medicines have doctors on their side, of course - doctors whose research they finance. Drugs and medicines can do a great deal of harm: undesirable side-effects are the fourth most common cause of death, after heart disease, cancer and strokes.
As a specific example, the amount of testosterone in men usually decreases after their fortieth birthday, though not necessarily by a significant degree. But of course this last point hasn't stopped the identification of (among other names) 'testosterone deficiency syndrome'. Fortunately this can be remedied by rubbing a gel into your stomach or shoulders every morning. In the words of a spokesperson for one company who make such a gel, 'Androtrop gel will only be successful if demand for it is created.' Selling a disease and its 'cure' is little different from selling cereals or the latest fashion.
In his final chapter, Blech notes that disease and poverty are related. Richer smokers live longer than poorer smokers, for instance. A Swedish study indicated that, when workers are sacked, they produce more stress hormones, which is likely to lead to the constriction of blood vessels. But those who market a disease have no time for such ideas: a person is ill because they are not taking the right medicine rather than because of the pressures of their lives. While we cannot argue that socialism will be a society without illness, we can certainly suggest that it will be a society without artificially-created illness - whether resulting from the stresses of capitalism or the bogus disease-marketing of the pharmaceutical companies.
Paul Bennett
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