Even childbirth was once considered a perfectly natural event. Sometime during our grandmother's time, childbirth moved out of the midwife's hands at home, into the doctor's hands at the hospital. While the results of that change weren't universally negative (infant and maternal mortality rates were drastically reduced), the rate of cesarean births shot through the roof.
Most recently, there has been a strong push by the medical industry to "medicalize' the perfectly natural condition known as menopause. The medical industries concept of "treating" menopause as an illness was born with the advent of antidepressants and tranquilizers in the mid to late 1950's. Although first used in mental hospitals, the pharmaceutical companies quickly grasped that a much larger market could be tapped in the form of middle-aged women. By the sixties, these drugs (among other psychotropics) were being widely promoted to doctors as a method to "cure" their menopausal patients of their "symptoms". Although prescribing tranquilizers as a form of treatment was quickly abandoned, the damage had been done: Menopause was now thought of as an "illness" that needed to be treated.
This approach then shifted quickly from the mind to the body. According to doctors, the women who were experiencing these menopause symptoms weren't nuts, they were just had a "estrogen deficiency disease". This, despite the fact that if estrogen deficiency were really a disease, all men should have been declared chronically ill. Instead, doctors declared this "disease" to be the result of a problem specific to females which they defined in the gynecological texts as ovarian or reproductive "failure". In short, women who were entering this perfectly natural stage in their reproductive lives were being labeled as "sick" failures. What's worse is that this type of thinking continues to dominate the medical approach to menopause. It's an approach that echoes the age old attitudes that were held about menstruation and childbirth. While men are free to naturally progress from youth to old age, women's progression through life leads to "illness" and "disease".
A perfect demonstration of this attitude can be demonstrated by a 1967 entry in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society by F.P.Rhoades which went so far as to call menopause a tragedy: "Many women are leading an active and productive life when this tragedy strikes. They are still attractive and mentally alert; they deeply resent what to them is a catastrophic attack upon their ability to earn a living and enjoy life." (Rhoades, F.P. "Minimizing the menopause." Journal of the American Geriatric Society 1969; 15(4):346-354)
Today, despite the fact that more and more medical professionals have begun to accept a less melodramatic approach to menopause; describing it as simply the transitional period from reproductive to non-reproductive status, many of the "old school" still prefers to approach menopause as a disease, which can have a number of unfortunate implications. On a practical level (the one that is further trumpeted by the pharmaceutical companies), it implies a distinct need for medication. In their opinion, it is a disease to be "treated" like any other. Unfortunately, this has led to a mindset among middle-aged women that they are ill simply because they have entered the "change".
Follow the Money - Menopause is Big Business
Despite the fact that women in so many other cultures experience menopause as a natural stage of life, there is one overwhelming reason why menopause has been turned into a "disease". In a word - money, money, money. The fact is, diseases need treatment, and (at least in the for-profit health system that exists in the United States) treatment costs money. The medical establishment in the U.S. has long been both a victim and willing participant of manipulation by the pharmaceutical industry.
Although we may think of the medical establishment as (*ahem*) above manipulation and the drug makers as altruistic, the fact is that the big pharmaceutical industry exists first and foremost as a vast profit machine. You need look no further than the relatively recent proliferation of television advertisements that are touting drugs for treating "conditions' that just a few years ag
