In the United States consumers are given information at every moment of the day. It has gotten to the point where people don’t make their own decisions, but rather let other external factors influence the choices they make.
Healthcare has become about prescribing as much medicine as possible. Our society has become over-medicalized, which enables pharmaceutical companies to influence our drug intake. The pharmaceutical industrial complex has become very pervasive in mainstream media. More often than not, this information taints the medical profession and results in massive suffering for the consumer.
In particular, patients who are not as economically affluent have less personal interactions with their doctors. Currently, knowledge is controlled by dominant regimes within the medical industry (just take it from John Oliver). The government has tried to pursue different measures that would put more regulations on these types of activities, but they are ultimately ineffective in changing current trends.
Judy Segal, in her book Health and the Rhetoric of Medicine, articulates the concept of the rhetoric creating hypochondria, or the condition that makes one constantly anxious that there is something wrong with them. Hypochondria is a rhetorical disorder because it becomes a question of convincing yourself that there is a problem (Segal, 2008). With the public sphere being influenced by drug industries and individuals seeking information shortcuts, it is very easy for media to tell people what they are ill with; thus, in regards to mental health, the medical industry becomes a rhetorical game. Segal (2008) quotes Kenneth Burke’s take on the influence of rhetoric on medicine: “the accumulating lore on the nature of 'psychogenic illnesses' has revealed that something so 'practical' as a bodily ailment may be a 'symbolic' act of the body, which in this materialization dances a corresponding state of mind" (pg 76).
To put the issue in simple terms, the messages that we see every day ultimately influence us to act a particular way. When it comes to drugs, we are pushed to consume like a neighborhood “pusher.” Overall, these problems in the medical industry have become very pervasive and influence almost every portion of our lives. There is no one single solution to how we can combat these human rights abuses that we deal with.
The pharmaceutical industry makes the most money out of all industries. They bypass the F.D.A for drug approvals, and many of their drugs have nasty side-effects. The only thing that we can do is slow responses to how the medical industry treats individuals who they see as dollar signs. Instrumentalism will be the best tool to delegitimize the the power structures that allocate information to us, which could, in turn, enable a broader conversation that will transfer into the halls of Congress and the medical industry overall.
