America’s women are a prime target of the nation’s major drug companies, intent on making a profit by peddling mood-altering drugs for problems as diverse and vague as loneliness, psychic tension, and marital anxiety.
And the male-dominated medical profession responds by writing more than twice as many prescriptions for women as for men. And it’s not just because more women go to doctors than men.
The Family Practice Clinic, at the University of Western Ontario, looked into the question of how doctors treat the same symptoms when they are presented by men and women.
They found that when a man is complaining of depression he is usually given a physical examination; a woman complaining of depression is more likely to be given a pat on the head and a prescription to boost her spirits.
Another survey, of Los Angeles physicians on the use of Librium, showed that most would prescribe Librium for a middle-aged housewife with marital problems while only about half would condone it for a college student suffering from high anxiety.
So strongly is the image of the neurotic woman ingrained in the male medical mind that even when scientific evidence clearly implicates organic origin, doctors are still inclined to diagnose the problem as psychosomatic. While research now suggests that headache and irritability associated with menstruation are caused by vascular changes and nausea during pregnancy comes from hormonal changes, many gynecology textbooks still represent these conditions as being caused or aggravated by psychological factors.
Not surprisingly, the National Institute for Drug Abuse reports that between one and two million women are addicted to mood altering drugs that are prescribed them by their physicians.
The lack of media exposure given this issue qualifies this story for nomination as one of the “best censored” stories of 1980.
SOURCE:
The Progressive, December 1980, “The ‘neurotic woman’ syndrome: How drug companies feed the fantasies of the male medical establishÂment,” by Tona Kiefer.