Medicalization and the logic of consumption: the medical-industrial complex and epistemicide in medical education

Abstract

This study critically examines medicalization as a technology of social control, operationalized through an interconnected triadic structure: reductionist biomedical hegemony, health commodification by the pharmaceutical industry, and epistemicide of traditional knowledge systems. Anchored in the critical theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ivan Illich, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, the essay analyzes cultural sources—including the documentaries Take Your Pills and Big Bucks, Big Pharma and the song Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine? —linking them to the Brazilian context. Findings reveal how the homogenizing biomedical model—exemplified during the pandemic by the political promotion of the “COVID kit”—marginalizes evidence-based practices. Simultaneously, the cultural industry naturalizes pharmacological consumption through symbolic associations between medications and performance ideals, a process rooted in the postwar satirization of Benzedrine. Epistemicide manifests in suppressing non-hegemonic knowledges and converting structural inequalities—such as gender-based overload, expressively medicalized in 40.5% of female depression cases—into individual pathologies. We conclude that medicalization reproduces colonial asymmetries by tethering health to consumption logics, proposing medical curriculum reform and pharmaceutical advertising regulation as strategies to advance epistemic equity and plurality in care practices.