Defining Disease in the Information Age 英文参考文献.docVIP

Correspondence Confessions of a Disease Monger of an international beauty ideal [2]. Beauty pageant winners in India are all extraordinarily tall and breathtakingly slim, have light honey-colored skin, and peddle Western ideals of beauty [3]. South Asian culture has carried within itself a capacity for female objecti?cation. Matrimonial columns and Web sites reveal the in?uence of a young woman’s skin color on her marketability to marriage partners [3]. The craze for modern fairness creams has emerged in the last ?fty years [2]. International cosmetics giants were the initial manufacturers, but these days Indian and South Asian companies are playing an important role in the skin bleaching and cosmetic markets [2,3]. Fairness creams have been estimated to account for up to 40% of the pro?ts of the cosmetics industry [3]. Recently, a fairness cream has been launched exclusively for men [4]. Advertisements aim to produce a hierarchy of values based on the notion that “fairness” is an object of desire [2]. Being fair has been represented as an active process. Regular use of fairness creams has been claimed to halt the production of melanin and to bring out “natural” beauty. Promoting a particular body image or behavior pattern as the preferred one and then selling medicines or products to help people attain the particular ideal may be regarded as disease mongering [5]. Fairness cream manufacturers have exploited the preference for fair skin, portrayed it as a necessary prerequisite for success, and promoted the use of their product to achieve the ideal. Controlled studies on the ef?cacy and safety of fairness creams are lacking. James Phelps I am a disease monger. I teach primary care doctors how to identify bipolar disorder. Worse yet, I take money from pharmaceutical companies for doing so. I use it to subsidize my practice so that I can treat patients with no insurance, or little money, who now account for over a third of my patients—in part because the pharmaceuti