Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America
by: Thomas Szasz
Pharmacracy: Medicine and Politics in America
By Thomas Szasz
Publisher: Praeger Trade
Number Of Pages: 240
Publication Date: 2001-07
ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0275971961
ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780275971960
Product Description:
In recent decades, American medicine has become increasingly politicized and politics has become increasingly medicalized. Behaviors previously seen as virtuous or wicked, wise or unwise are now dealt with as "healthy" or "sick"–unwanted behaviors to be controlled as if they were public health issues. The modern penchant for transforming human problems into "diseases" and judicial sanctions into "treatments," replacing the rule of law with the rule of medical discretion, leads to a type of government social critic Thomas Szasz calls "pharmacracy." This insidious political development is eroding our personal liberties while distorting our approach to both health care and politics.
Summary: Quack!
Rating: 1
Szasz and the reviewers fo this book have obviously never suffered from nor known anyone who suffers from a serious mental illness. Far from being just bad or unwanted behaviors or ‘fake diseases’, mental illness is a devastating disease that ruins lives and often kills its victims.
After years of denial and attemps to control my own behavior, my life spun out ot control and I went from a respected professional in my community to a manic-depressive psychotic, roaming the streets delusional, completely out of touch with reality. It took commitment to the state mental hospital to give me some insight into my problem.
Thanks to the drugs that Szasz and others find so questionable, I am now able to lead a normal, stable life. Without the progress made in pharmacology in the last thirty years many people like me would be confined to mental institutions for extended periods or permanently.
This book is nothing more than a rant by an elderly doctor who needs to catch up with the real world. There is much still to be learned about brain function and the mechanisms of these disorders, but the fact that we don’t have all the answers yet doesn’t mean that they aren’t out there. Or should I say in there?
Unless you don’t want to be pulled back into the ninteenth century, steer clear of this book. Szasz is quackers!
Summary: The Politics of Medicine
Rating: 5
This is a great book for laying to rest some orthodox but wrong ideas about our mental health. Szasz shows us that the orthodox way is not necessarily the right way. Certainly our own doctors are not going to blow the whistle on themselves, are they? This revolutionary psychiatrist shows us the real path to health, pointing us away from the wrong direction that the pharmaceutical companies have been leading us, and unfortunately, leading our doctors as well. It’s a case of the fox guarding the henhouse.
Do you care that a psychiatrist is a doctor who prescribes drugs to change people’s brains without ever actually examining those people’s brains? Do you worry that nobody knows exactly what the long-term effect of these drugs are that we are now being given for bi-polar disorder, for attention deficit disorder, for depression or for anxiety; or even if they are really doing us more harm than good? Do you know how doctors today are becoming more and more controlled and subverted by the pharmaceutical industry? Do you think that unwanted behavior and unwanted feelings like anxiety and depression are diseases that can be cured by drugs? If you do, you should read the latest book by this world renowned psychiatrist.
"Psychiatrists have a long history of systematically validating fake diseases as real diseases, and getting away with it," says Szasz. They can get away with it because it serves everybody: the family whose medical insurance will pay only for certain diagnoses and not for others; the government officials who can allocate more and more federal funds for their universities and laboratories; and the doctors who can service many more patients in the "service station" atmosphere that has us all believing that everything can be made right with the right pill. The only person whom fake diagnoses and powerful drugs are not serving is the health of the individual who is having his birthright sold for a pharmaceutical mess of pottage.
We are confusing, warns Szasz, bodily diseases which are physiochemical phenomena located in the body and understood by cellular pathology with unwanted personal habits or behaviors which are located in the social context of society and understood by the interconnecting relationships. We are confusing the mind with the brain. And finally, we are confusing medicine with politics and social agenda. In so doing we are becoming less and less the land of the free and the brave and more and more the land of the mentally ill and deluded. Szasz makes a good case for a new look at the insidious subversion of our medical care by the politics of pharmaceutical managed care.
Summary: this book could save your life
Rating: 5
Pharmacracy
Do you care that a psychiatrist is a doctor who prescribes drugs to change people’s brains without ever actually examining those people’s brains? Do you worry that nobody knows exactly what the long-term effect of these drugs are that we are now being given for bi-polar disorder, for attention deficit disorder, for depression or for anxiety; or even if they are really doing us more harm than good? Do you know how doctors today are becoming more and more controlled and subverted by the pharmaceutical industry? Are unwanted behavior and unwanted feelings like anxiety and depression diseases that can be cured by drugs? If you think they are, please run as fast as you can and get this book. It could save your life.
Summary: Thomas Szasz Does It Again
Rating: 5
Dr. Szasz, now 81 years old, has done it again: explained what’s going on in the minds of psychiatrists and their adulators from the Surgeon General on down. And why.
For example, he tells us how doctors are really paid and explains the corrupting effect of third party reimbursement by DRG (Diagnosis Related Groups)on the most important and the kindest thing any doctor can do: make an accurate diagnosis.
There are new insights, new quotes and the usual entertaining anecdotes and fastidious footnotes.
Psychiatric obscurantism is impacting every American every time he or she is misinformed: "Depression is a disease like diabetes - ask your Doctor about…." And that’s just TV.
What kills me is how the parrots of psychobaffle preen themselves on their courage at having broken through the mind body barrier - as if obliterating one of childhood’s most important lessons - that thinking doesn’t make it so - is an accomplishment to squawk over: "Look Mom, I can fly."
How dumb can we get? Read this book and find out. The bamboozlement of Mental Health already is to the 21st Century what the propaganda of Communism and National Socialism were to the 20th. Immunize yourself now.
Dr. Szasz has been one of the clearest thinkers and writers for 50 years and this book is another brilliant facet to the immense diamond which is his life’s work.
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