BIOPOLITICS TODAY: FROM PREVENTION TO THE HYPOCHONDRIZATION OF SOCIETY
An old medical aphorism says that health is a transitory state of well-being that does not bode well: in the end we all get sick. That is why prevention must have a proportionality, a rationality, it cannot be an absolute that ends up generating more problems than the ones it tries to solve. Something that our society is forgetting more and more.
We already said in another article that rationality was something that today was considered superseded, amortized, outdated, given the brilliance that accompanies intuition and emotion, which apparently should be our guides in life. Well, that is precisely the target through which hypochondrization enters, through irrationality, fears, easily induced in relation to health. And this target is of course associated with the enormous lack of health training suffered by the population. For example, why is the rationality and demystification offered by the evolutionary model not explained, for which disease is not a punishment, a threat or a Biblical evil but rather the consequence of the interaction of certain adaptation factors that are increasingly known today? better and better, and that if they are understood, they can often be resolved. Illness is an accident, an adaptive challenge.
With the laudable excuse of preventing diseases, something very important of course, a great campaign of hypochondrization of the population is being carried out: for example, a significant part of the advertising deals with the risks of diseases, and the consequent products for prevent them. With the commendable intention of protecting ourselves, fear first enters our bodies, then it rushes to offer us the product that can save us. (An old procedure, moreover well known in other areas of society).
It is true that the 1948 WHO declaration enshrined the famous definition that “health is the state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not the mere absence of disease” with the well-intentioned purpose of integrating psychosocial aspects into the concept of health. That definition was raised in the context of the appearance of public health systems and decolonization, and had the objective of showing the importance of improving the living conditions of society. But in the long run this idea has been modified, we could say its meaning has been perverted, and health has come to be considered an absolute for which any price must be paid, paradoxically even at the risk of one’s own health, as occurs when to prevent pills with dangerous side effects are taken or repeated exploratory risk tests are done indiscriminately.
The current dominant system, based on the capitalist idea of the gladiator fight, always needs to have an enemy to eliminate or exploit. As Sandín points out, bacteria and viruses fulfill this role perfectly. The message must be conveyed to the population that they live in permanent danger, at war. “Have you taken your defenses yet?” tells us a well-known advertisement showing someone who has just gotten out of bed. This is war, “more wood”, as Groucho Marx would say
Well, only 1 percent of viruses and bacteria are hostile to us, and that under certain circumstances, but we already have an external enemy along the lines of Orwell in 1984. It is known that our body has more symbiotic bacteria with us than they are part of ourselves, what cells. Our DNA is made up largely of embedded viruses, which fulfill important functions, but here we are installed in the war against viruses and bacteria to achieve total asepsis, the need to always improve our defenses in this permanent war in which we we found. The consequences, apart from unnecessary health spending and the fear in which we live… are, for example, an increase in allergies and a decrease in the immune response.
Let’s not talk anymore on a psychological level, a topic that I have discussed in other articles on this same blog, where the premeditated confusion between stress and anxiety disorders, grief and depression, etc. it’s massive.
However, we know very well, in relation to disease prevention, that what most affects health is poverty, something that is growing exponentially in our society. There should lie a very relevant part of true prevention, not in hypochondriasis. Today we know very well that just by living in a poor area of a city, life expectancy decreases by 10 years, or that living on the street reduces 20 years of life. “The street kills”. Because, as pointed out from epidemiology, in health the zip code weighs more than the genetic code.
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Video of the Conference “Biopolitics today. Tribute to Michel Foucault” held in the Aula Magna of the University of Barcelona on March 7, 2014.