2024-02-09 11:21:26
Panaceas are defined as medicines that can cure anything. History is full of them: centaury, theriac, ginseng, snake oil and sympathy powder are the most famous. But their business was very unprofitable, due to lack of a business plan.
Theriac contained more than a hundred substances intended to cure all ailments, but above all it contained a good dose of opium. The pharmacists who distributed it by the ladle had not yet understood all the money that might be made from opiate addiction. Sympathy powder healed all wounds, alas, it might heal at a distance, which was not favorable for trade. Snake oil guaranteed eternal life to all the conquerors of the Far West, but the hawker doctors often sold it off.
Until the 1980s, Europeans were the only ones to manufacture vaccines that saved millions of lives. But their ridiculous price attracted neither merchants nor shareholders. When the Americans became interested, their prices were multiplied by ten or a hundred for the same service provided. The United States has truly saved the honor of the health market. The peddlers have become marketing experts, the pharmacists have understood addiction, the sales pitches have become adorned with diagnostic science and the ladles of opium have become two-color capsules.
At the end of the 19th century, cocaine was promoted as an anesthetic, but also to treat seasickness, dyspepsia, asthma, cachexia, impotence, alcoholism, shyness, hysteria, neurasthenia and morphinomania. Freud was an enthusiastic promoter.
In 1950 the first neuroleptic, Largactil®, was proposed for alcoholism, anxiety, asthma, behavioral disorders in children, hiccups, vomiting, gastric ulcer, menopause, psoriasis. , cancer phobia, agitation, senility, apathy, manias, aggressiveness, mental deficiencies, stress, delusions, without forgetting all the pain.
At the end of the 20th century, another neuroleptic, Zyprexa® shamelessly took advantage of this craze for psychiatry, an El Dorado for pharmacologists. It has been validated once morest schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorders and schizotypal personalities, but it has also been promoted in bipolar disorder, Parkinson’s and senility psychoses, unipolar depression, dysthymia, drug addiction and withdrawal syndromes, anxiety, borderline personality, aggression, anorexia, involuntary movements, autism, ADHD, bulimia, musculoskeletal disorders, sexual dysfunctions, somatomorphic disorders, vestibular disorders, nausea and vomiting, and of course all the pain.
The peddlers had transformed placebos into panaceas and psychiatry transformed panaceas into blockbusters. The brain is the easiest organ to corrupt, in every sense of the word.
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