What are the benefits and/or limitations of framing women’s health and well-being in pharmaceutical terms?


 


Some individualsfight to be recognized as ill, or fight to be recognized as healthy, whereasothers contest such declarations of disease and normality. Aspeople encounter these fights, they forge collective identities.Now more than ever, the social identities that individuals constructfor themselves in terms of disease are being complicated bytheir relationships with pharmaceutical.[1]


Sexual problems in women are highly prevalent and are frequently associated with significant quality of life and interpersonal consequences. A recent analysis of the National Health and Social Life Survey data showed a strong association between problems of sexual desire, arousal, and pain in women with decreased physical satisfaction, emotional satisfaction, and overall life satisfaction. As is the same with alcoholism, female sexual dysfunctions are already considered a disease. There are speculations as to whether this reference of sexual dysfunctions as a disease is a way of meeting unmet needs or to build new markets for medications for pharmaceutical companies.


            Sexual dysfunction is defined as the absence of complete sexual functioning. It is more prevalent in men and women with poor emotional and physical health. Sometimes the exact cause cannot be determined. Physical causes for sexual dysfunction in women such as infection, diabetes, neurological disease, drug or alcohol use, and aging changes are ruled out first. Unresolved anger, fear of pregnancy, and depression can cause a lack of desire and loss of interest in being sexual.


            Yet despite given meanings of the term, there are still questions as to what really constitutes female sexual dysfunction. There is a prevalent lack of agreement about its definition. Whatever its meaning, it holds true that it is often associated with negative thoughts and feelings towards sex in general, to oneself, or to one’s partner.


            Different pharmaceutical companies have invested time and effort in women’s problems and dysfunctions. They use public relations, direct-to-consumer advertising, promotion of off-label prescribing, and other tactics to create a sense of widespread sexual inadequacy and interest in drug treatments.[2] This is of course to the advantage of pharmaceutical companies’ sales. But what about for women?


Sexual choices and expectations are still largely governed by traditional religion and a double standard.[3] Even if it is accepted for women to be vocal about their sexual choices and practices, there are still some groups and individuals that promote stigma against it. For them, women were being fed with ideas that there is something wrong with them that needs to be cured. Through such actions from pharmaceutical companies, women are being taught that they should want and expect high rewards from their sexual life.


Other than sexual dysfunctions, virtually other female problem has been tried to be cured with a pharmaceutical drug. It is all very well for drugs to do small things: to induce sleep, allay anxiety, ameliorate a well-recognized syndrome. But for a drug’s effect to be so global–to extend to social popularity, business acumen, self-image, energy, flexibility, sexual display–touches too closely on extreme fantasies about medication for the mind. Such is the case for the drug Prozac.


Prozac has effects that heals and transforms women. Depressed women found that they have been cured of their depression because of the drug. Like psychoanalysis, Prozac exerts its influence not only in its interaction with individual patients, but through its effect on contemporary thought.[4] Modern psychopharmacology has almost become a whole climate of opinion under which people conduct their different lives.[5]


The benefits of this current formation of women’s health and well-being in pharmaceutical terms are a more humanized doctor-patient relationship, effectiveand safe new drugs, and increased public and research attentionto the complexity of female sexual problems. Female sexual problems are hard to quantify, unlike male sexual problems. With the participation of women, drug companies could make more drugs that are more safe and effective.


            The disadvantage of framing women’s health and well-being in medical terms is that peoples’ minds are being guided on what is being seen in researches although not all of them could be true. With the amount of research that has been done on female sexuality including dysfunction, women’s health and well-being are now being framed in medical terms.


The disadvantage,in a process so heavily sponsored by drug companies, is that thecomplex social, personal, and physical causes of sexual difficultiesandthe range of solutions to themwill be swept away in the rushto diagnose, label, and prescribe. Perhaps the greatest concerncomes from the flip side of inflated estimates of disease prevalencetheever-narrowing definitions of “normal” which help turn the complaintsof the healthy into the conditions of thesick.[6] Women who are perfectly normal could be considered sick just because of some sexual dysfunction.


Viagra, as almost everyone knows, has been used to treat sexual dysfunction in men.  When used with women, it has been shown to be beneficial in a proportion of cases. But even though it has been shown to have benefits, there lies the question of which women are more likely to benefit and such issue still has not been shed much light into. Pott’s in the article laid out an examination of the masculinity in the cyborg through a case study group of men on the sexual enhancement drug Viagra. It cannot be denied from reading Pott’s article that it provides an unusual masculine reading of the cyborg.


Perhaps women have been misunderstood when it comes to these so-called female sexual dysfunctions. These incidences of impaired sexual response in females could be due to psychological reasons or adaptive reactions to normally occurring problems in a relationship. These could just have been mislabeled as dysfunctions, yet are not really. Pharmaceutical companies and other concerned groups would therefore have problems or difficulties as to which treatment will be beneficial for women since in the first place there is still a debate as to whether women experience adaptive inhibitions or maladaptive inhibitions.


Such an issue wherein women are being conformed and shaped according to pharmaceutical issues relate to a societal perspective. The influence of pharmaceutical health research usually focuses on society, on this case – on women. This shows the interest of governmental policy making bodies to regulate and allocate resources across societal interests.


From this perspective, the costs and values of treatment are based on the interest of society as a whole. Women’s sexual problems were being seen as a problem and a disease which could affect the society and therefore needs to be taken action. A strong argument can be made that the societal perspective such as this wherein women’s health and well-being are being framed in pharmaceutical terms is the right thing to do because it considers the well-being of all members of society.


However, it should not be forgotten that society is made up of many different values and interests, and it is not always possible to determine which costs and values best reflect the interests of all members. Framing women’s health and well-being in accordance to pharmaceutical terms may benefit other individuals but not necessarily all. In addition, this framing women’s health and well-being in accordance to pharmaceutical terms does not take into account the particular interests and circumstances of some individual organizations. In an effort to find a common denominator, this perspective can produce results that are not in the best interest of an organization or even to the women. Pharmaceutical companies, as well as consumers, should therefore confrontdisease and its treatment by looking beyond mere pharmacology:it is only in the context of a set of explanations that ourunderstanding of a drug and illness become crystallized.


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 


 



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