Medicine Man: On Our Changing Times

November 3, 2009

"Formerly, when religion was strong and science weak, men mistook magic for medicine; now, when science is strong and religion weak, men mistake medicine for magic." – Thomas Szasz. (From "Sunbeams", The Sun magazine, November, 2009 issue.)

As an academic and a social critic who regularly writes and speaks out against what he terms the social control goals of today’s medicine, Professor Szasz is Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry at the State University of New York Health Science Center in Syracuse, New York.

Whether or not you may choose to agree either with his criticisms of medicine or with his philosophical outlook on life in general, Professor Szasz does point out one area of our lives that in my opinion has become clearly out of control.

Because there now seems to be a pill or a prescription drug designed for almost every ailment one can imagine, and even for many ailments one may not even be capable of imagining, many of us have come to believe and accept the idea that successful treatment of all our physical ills must of necessity always be centered around medication.

Repetitive, near incessant advertising, particularly in magazines, on radio and television and on the Internet, can be all-too-helpful in convincing us that we do not need to consider possibly altering either our lifestyle or our thinking on the subject. We thus become convinced that we need only find that magic pill which is capable of quickly and easily solving all our problems; problems that surprisingly often simply do not even exist.

Personally, I do not happen to agree with every part of the philosophy espoused by Professor Szasz. Even so, I do think he is absolutely correct whenever he says that in spite of what we believe about the benefits of medication, medicine itself should never be mistaken for nor equated with "magic."

In fact, our continued insistence and our over-dependence on pharmaceuticals as our primary form of medical care is likely to remain a significant stumbling block in our attempts at effectively managing our health care and our health care costs. Such misplaced confidence in the supposed inherent "magic" of medicine will likely also interfere with our attempts at health care reform, whatever form those attempts might happen to eventually take.

Unfortunately, I believe that our unreasonable approach is going to continue to be a problem for us until such time that we become willing to step back and take some type of corrective action aimed at our unrealistic expectations and at our relatively narrow view of health care treatment.