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 comprising reductionist biomedical hegemony, the commodification of health by the pharmaceutical industry, and the epistemicide of traditional forms of knowledge. Grounded in the critical theoretical frameworks of Michel Foucault, Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Ivan Illich, and Boaventura de Sousa Santos, this essay analyzes cultural sources, including the documentaries Take Your Pills and Big Bucks, Big Pharma, as well as the song Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine?, relating them to the Brazilian context. The findings demonstrate how a homogenizing biomedical model, exemplified during the COVID-19 pandemic by the politically driven promotion of the “COVID kit,” marginalizes evidence-based practices. Simultaneously, the culture industry normalizes pharmaceutical consumption through symbolic associations between medications and ideals of performance, a process whose roots can be traced back to the postwar satirization of Benzedrine. Epistemicide manifests through the suppression of non-hegemonic forms of knowledge and the transformation of structural inequalities, such as gender-related caregiving burdens, medicalized in 40.5% of cases of depression among women, into individual pathologies. Medicalization reproduces colonial asymmetries by linking health to consumerist logics. Medical curriculum reform and stricter regulation of pharmaceutical advertising are proposed as strategies to promote equity and epistemic pluralism in healthcare practices.