Medicalization Quotes

The most powerful entities on earth are not governments but the multi-national corporations that see women as their territory, indoctrinating them with their versions of beauty, health and hygiene, medicating them and cultivating their dependency in order to medicate them some more.

Politicizing of kids starts with pregnancy, of course. You shouldn't be drinking wine. You can't be smoking, either. The poor woman is poked and prodded and touched and obsessed over.

I had a home birth because I really believe in the body's natural ability to give birth. The medical profession has kind of warped women's minds into thinking we don't know how to birth and we need doctors and epidurals and Pitocin.

The rebel is doomed to a violent death. The rest of us can look forward to sedated expiration in a coma inside an oxygen tent, with tubes inserted in every bodily orifice.

We are the only species of mammal that doubts our ability to give birth. It's profitable to scare women about birth. But let's stop it. I tell women: Your body is not a lemon.

My mother's a psychologist, my stepfather's a psychologist, my stepmother is a therapist and my dad's a lawyer. So it was all prominent in my life. I don't know anyone who doesn't know someone on some form of prescription medicine.

According to the Western model, pregnancy is a disease, menopause is a disease, and even getting pregnant is a disease. Dangerous drugs and devices are given to women, but not to men- just for birth control. I've reached the conclusion that to many doctors BEING A WOMAN IS A DISEASE

The literature of menopause is the saddest, the most awful, and the most medical of all genres. You're sleepless, you're anxious, you're fat, you're depressed - and the advice is always the same: take more walks, eat some kale, and drink lots of water. It didn't help.

The preoccupation with transition and with surgery objectifies trans people, and we don't get to really deal with the real lived experiences.

By pretending that convention is Nature, that disobeying a personal prohibition is a medical illness, they establish themselves as agents of social control and at the same time disguise their punitive interventions in the semantic and social trappings of medical practice.

You [ Peter R. Breggin] have basically implied that they've turned our schools into something other than schools. What do you think the government has in mind by turning our schools into little clinics?

Pregnancy is treated like an illness in some sections of our society.

It is frightening how dependent on drugs we are all becoming and how easy it is for doctors to prescribe them as the universal panacea for our ills.

That's one of my issues with the pharmaceutical industry - they believe pharmacy is a panacea for absolutely everything.

I was beginning to understand something about normality. Normality wasn't normal. It couldn't be. If normality were normal, everybody could leave it alone. They could sit back and let normality manifest itself. But people-and especially doctors- had doubts about normality. They weren't sure normality was up the job. And so they felt inclined to give it a boost.

“Healthy" and “diseased," as Susan Sontag points out...are often subjective judgments that society makes for its own purposes. Women have long been defined as sick as a means of subjecting them to social control.

Generally, the ways we discuss the fat body pathologize it; we treat it as a medical problem and/or a social problem that must be solved. "Morbid obesity" is in many ways saying we are the walking dead. Or walking to our death. And that is no way to live, with that sort of moniker hanging over your head at all times. I think it forces fat people to internalize a lot of unnecessary self-loathing.

The trouble with being a hypochondriac these days is that antibiotics have cured all the good diseases.

The conservative assumes sickness as a necessity, and his social frame is a hospital, his total legislation is for the present distress, a universe in slippers and flannels, with bib and papspoon, swallowing pills and herb-tea.

No further evidence is needed to show that 'mental illness' is not the name of a biological condition whose nature awaits to be elucidated, but is the name of a concept whose purpose is to obscure the obvious.

When you destroy midwives, you also destroy a body of knowledge that is shared by women, that can’t be put together by a bunch of surgeons or a bunch of male obstetricians, because physiologically, birth doesn’t happen the same way around surgeons, medically trained doctors, as it does around sympathetic women.

The 'science' behind hormone replacement therapy has put women on a medically engineered, press-fueled, big pharma funded roller coaster ride.

Like fast-food chains, child psychiatric inpatient units and the wholesale psychiatric drugging of children, in and out of hospitals, are recent...and remarkably popular products and practices.

The current approach that psychiatry takes almost ignores social worlds in which mental health problems arise and tries to become highly biomedical like other branches of medicine such as cardiology or oncology. But psychiatry has to be far more embedded in people's personal and social worlds.

Most people look at ageing as a disease. They do. They have prescriptions and places where you go to eradicate it.