Have a problem with your self-image?
Don’t worry. It’s probably nothing a scalpel and some pills can’t handle.
To highlight the effects of how the practice of medicine is changing in American society, The University of Memphis Center for the Humanities brought Carl Elliott, M.D., Ph.D., to discuss his new book “Better than Well: American Medicine Meets the American Dream.”
Elliott is associate professor and co-director of Graduate Studies at the University of Minnesota’s Center for Bioethics.
Elliott’s Feb. 28 lecture examined people who turn to medicine to help them become the people they want to be. He discussed medical technologies used to reinvent people, combat social stigma and achieve self-fulfillment to a crowd of approximately 20 students, professors and members of the community.
“Constantly being barraged with images of how the ideal person should look leads many people to be displeased with their self-image,” Elliott said.
He said the lucrative financial potential of helping individuals conquer their self-image problems with chemical peels, Botox injections, and nips and tucks have changed how medicine is practiced.
Plastic surgeons performed over 220,000 cosmetic breast implant surgeries on women in 2001, with a noted increase likely for 2002, according to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
However, men are not immune to concern over how they look.
In an effort to attain the “buff” look, researchers have noted an alarming increase in obsessive weight training and the use of dietary supplements and dangerous steroids among young men.
Elliott told of an individual who obsessed over bodybuilding for seven years, quoting the man as saying, “It took me a long time to find that I was not the person that I had worked so hard to become.”
Medicine’s ability to change people is not limited to physical changes, however.
“Significant advances in psychotropic therapy” Elliott said “... have concreted Richard Nixon’s belief that ‘we have created in America a culture of drugs.’”
Medications controlling how individuals interact with others are the pharmaceutical industry’s most profitable sector, Elliott said, adding that GlaxoSmithKline, the manufacturer of Paxil, spent more money on advertising in 2001 than Nike.
“The ability to reprogram personalities with a pill, while convenient, is also ethically challenging. How much of a personality do we change?” Elliott asked.
The use of Ritalin to treat Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder in children is now very wide spread, according to Elliott.
Elliott concluded his lecture with information about people who sometimes voluntarily undergo extreme body modifications.
“With modern sex hormone therapy, sex reassignment surgery, facial feminization surgery and cosmetic surgeries can substantially modify a male to female transsexual’s body to properly match her innate gender, especially if treatment is started early enough in life,” Elliott said.
Elliott said one sex reassignment recipient told him that after the surgery, she felt relieved and said, “I finally quit living the lie that I was born into.”
Elliott reiterated his opinion that any body modification is people’s attempt to become better in their own eyes.
“People should remember that even moderate body modifications like braces or tattoos come from a desire for the person to become their ideal self,” he said.
