The festival Sciences infuses , which takes place from September 17 to October 14 under the title “What health for tomorrow? “. This is the general question, common to the events on which you can inform yourself from this page .
Saturday, October 7 at 17:00 will be held at the library Elsa Triolet de Pantin a round table under the title ” What patients will we be tomorrow?” , which I will have the pleasure of intervening to discuss with Caroline BARRY , researcher at INSERM, member of a team charged with evaluating alternative practices. This team has already made several scientific evaluation reports of certain practices (so-called soft, alternative, natural pseudo-medicines, …) such as osteopathic, auriculotherapy, hypnosis, etc. Caroline Barry will present and comment on the results of these assessments and future prospects. As for me, I will talk about the technosciences in medicine, from the point of view of ethical issues and the necessary critical reading of the promises …
Before commenting on and discussing the criticisms of a psychoanalysis which is the typical example of pseudo-scientific mystification , here is the presentation of the round table on this page of the Pantin libraries website, which also contains all the practical information :
“A custom-made medicine is the promise of personalized medicine Thanks to the progress of genetics, pharmacy and computer science, a scientific revolution is announced: treat each patient according to his genetic profile, his environment.
But this predictive medicine is also worrying: is it really reliable? Predicting a disease that may be declared in 20 years, does not spoil the lives of patients who moreover are turning more and more to alternative medicine: hypnosis, fasting, osteopathy …
Philosopher, host of the blog Pharmacists, Elena Pasca of the association Sciences Citoyennes is known as a whistleblower , she will exchange with Caroline Barry, researcher at INSERM who works on the evaluation of alternative medicine.
Image: CC BY-CN-ND 2.0 Richard Ricciardi “
I would like to read these two aspects otherwise, I would like to be able to say that this festival is questioning this year on the forms of health that are set up on the one hand by the growing influence of pseudo-sciences (“alternative medicine”, “alternative medicine”, complementary medicine), on the other hand by changes in medicine coming from technosciences and technological applications. Because these two aspects are essential in the answer on the patients that we will be tomorrow: be believers and accepting all that comes from the technosciences and goes towards the transhumanism and the increased man, the strengthened capacities, etc. This theoretical augmented man will have a very unequal and differential impact: he will benefit from a few very rich sources, but his development will be done by creating and extending more and more a market of the human body redefined as a capital, a database and possessions to capitalize, to fructify, to transform from value of use into exchange value, which begins with the body broken up and deconstructed into components (organs, tissues, genes, cells, intracellular components, etc.).
this page , starting with this one ) on their physiological states, diktats of the modes, of the Jeunisme, thus undergoing injunctions to “not let go, “to use plastic surgery and regenerative medicine, etc. The latter being at the crossroads between conventional medicine and pseudo-medicines (alternative, complementary, soft and other abusive terms, since it is not about medicine).
The interests of many industries depend on the hold of sexist and differential stereotypes and clichés (on different abilities, so different functions) on women. So, in the end, these interests depend on the hold of psychoanalytic theories on all the domains involved in one way or another in the discussion of the nature of women and the consequences (various applications). Especially since, being a lack, an absence, a negative, an enigma in the pejorative sense of the term, a perverse without superego, envious of the penis, hysterical by definition, etc. every woman must experience psychic problems because of the inherent destructiveness of her nature, her overflowing of amorphous affects, and so on. All this comes from an anatomy reconstructed by psychoanalysis according to the needs of the cause, and erected into destiny: the absence of external sexual organs (?!), Because psychoanalysis sees the woman as an anatomical hole, doubled by ‘a hole in culture and civilization’ …
We must stop the woman, says Jacques Lacan, since we can only “half-say” of this bitch described by the absence of all the properly human capacities, held by men (reason, logic, form (versus affects amorphous ), capacity of abstraction, ethics and morality) who are the only ones to put in place and to be able to perpetuate the symbolic order, the Law of the human species, guaranteed by the equation intended to place the Name-of-the-Father on the desire of the mother … Equation that Yann Diener , another Lacanian in position of power and the public money that psychoanalysts do not want to lose, we regularly rehash in Charlie Hebdo , with other dogmas and some quotes from the master charlatan Jacques Lacan. He said everything and his opposite.
Why are males the only ones endowed with human faculties? Given the anatomy as destiny , it is inevitably in the anatomy that the answer is found: the males have nothing to prove, to accomplish to be worthy of the name “being human”, “humanity” . On the contrary, in view of the risks to mankind posed by the new women’s rights, including the “belly empire,” men should physically show who is the leader, to assert the Law against all that destroys them. legal-symbolic frame of masters. This has the consequence that they lose their superb, “the foreclosure of the Name-of-the-Father” which endangers children … See the rants of an incredible hatred of women and their families. rights, in addition to the usual misogyny and gynophobia, in the Lacanian psychoanalyst Gilbert Levet , for example in his book Enfant hyperactif, enfant bethe .
So men have nothing to prove because they possess the only psychoanalytic symbol, the guarantor of noble human capacities: the penis, the only organizer of sexuality, the unconscious and culture , according to Lacanians … women with their Penisneid (penis desire) live in perversion even if they prove to have all the abilities and know how to use them … There, they are phallic and must be mate, brought to accept “the feminine position” and to make the apology. Psychoanalysis is a therapy in this sense. Mater women. Maintain the symbolic order, the privileges of males, guarantors of the Law.
The whole psychoanalytic sect mobilizes itself not to give up an inch of the enormous cultural influence – all the psy culture results – from total control over medicine and care in general. This is what the unpardonable Gerard Pommier – another author of misogynistic lucubrations dubbed pseudo-scientific verbiage, as master gurus Freud and Lacan have always done – called ” the empire of psychoanalysis “, recalling among others, the majority of child psychiatrists have psychoanalytic training. Gérard Pommier is the president of the association “Pour la psychanalyse”, which leads the battle to keep a total grip on the entire culture psy, and nothing to give in hyperactivity and autism. I will come back to this again and again, explaining in detail that the defense of helpless children is a pretext – a noble cause, which is better in the media than direct sexism – to attack women, responsible for the diseases of their children (mother crocodile, mother spider, causing havoc on girls, …) and, as hysterics, also their …
In 2004, INSERM published an evaluation report on psychoanalysis (which can be downloaded from this page ), which made the psychoanalysts furious and mobilized to censor it. Censorship, intimidation, pressure, verbiage and smoking all over the media and thanks to the relays of their positions of power – that’s what psychoanalysis is, as we still see it in the attempt to disrupt the holding of a conference on hyperactivity, on September 29th. Because Gérard Pommier and the others do not support that other approaches are evoked. There is a smell of disappearing public money to finance medical-educational centers, medical-psychological centers and other structures in which the psychoanalyst settles and leaves a child with autism stay in one corner during the whole session , if he wants.
We hear such statements from them in Sophie Robert’s documentary , The Wall. Psychoanalysis challenged by autism . Documentary that psychoanalysts have tried to censor, by suing the director, by launching a campaign of disinformation and denigration unprecedented. The High Health Authority has classified psychoanalysis among the methods that have not proved their effectiveness in autism, and it is a precedent that psychoanalysts do not want to see reproduce and whose consequences they want to limit. And, incredible as it may seem, they managed to drown everything in a communication 100% psychoanalysis, victimizing themselves, saying that it is their critical potential, their status beyond the control, the specificities of a science that is set to standardization and the big bad DSM, in short, what would be the exceptional virtues of psychoanalysis in terms of therapeutics, social criticism (where?), critical vision of the world, resistance, the last bastion of humanity and listening to the suffering of the subject, blah blah, which would have the gift of irritating all those who want to serve the interests of the pharmaceutical industry, want to stay in their neurosis to draw secondary benefits (especially women, all hysterical but claiming to be somatic patients), etc.
Medicine is reproached, including by psychoanalysts, dehumanization, depersonalization, the coldness of a technical platform and expeditious acts eliminating the most important, namely listening to a person suffering. It is not only from the point of view of the verbalization of suffering that listening is crucial. Because studies of the causes of medical errors have shown that more than 90% result from insufficient listening, because the patient is interrupted after thirteen seconds on average. This lack of humanity, this side expeditious explanations are discussed elsewhere, which are also co-responsible for over-medicalization (see the introduction to Workshop No. 2 on the causes of over-medicalization, and my presentation that develop it at the 2012 Bobigny symposium on this page ). Because instead of taking the time to listen to the description of the symptoms by the patient, the doctor prescribes additional examinations, which can lead to an endless spiral, for example if we discover an incidentaloma, which will give rise to other imaging tests, blood tests, etc.
Then the technosciences – the height of dehumanization – come to the aid of medicine and promise to be the vector by which humanity and the totality of the person will be reintegrated into care. If, and only if, we accept that medicine integrates technosciences to profoundly change its raison d’être, to go even further in what I have called the misuse of the social function of medicine, in presentation on the causes of over-medicalization already mentioned .
The boundaries are unclear between a commodity health and well-being that is highlighted by the WHO definition and allows for an infinity of forms of marketing and trade, and on the side of the complex medico-industrial and the complex side naturo-psycho-holistic. Both use the same marketing strategies of misinformation, the same techniques of the communication of influence, consisting among others to scare us to handle, sell us more and more expensive products. Both fall under the same logic of medicalization and overconsumption. It must be emphasized, because the merchants and ideologues of nature canned and psychic decoding (according to prejudices and beliefs) we smoke by presenting the alternatives as off-market system, or even anti-system. With them, it is the products sold that change, not the logic, nor the commodification. In addition, these products can multiply infinitely, despite the lack of any evidence of effectiveness, because they fall under the regulations on food supplements … No guarantee, no control. Neoliberalism reaches its peak with this trade, on the one hand, and on the other, with the biotechnological applications that pave the way for transhumanism. Contrary to the illusions sold under phrases such as “personalized medicine”, preventive medicine, etc., these medico-industrial practices deny the person and fragment it until dissociating the body and transforming it into a database (tissues, cells, genes , organs, …). Each individual would be a self-entrepreneur, holding a “health capital” that he must maintain, increase, grow. The conceptions of social protection, medicine and care in general are transformed, altered at the same time as the notions of causality, normality, pathology versus deviance, responsibility … Reinforce one’s capital with the help of the technique presented as an extension of the human and allowing to develop and multiply the capacities, it is the first step towards the acceptance of the increased man . But neither the augmented man nor the bionic man will be for everyone. The poor will be guinea pigs and donors, as was seen in the case of John Moore, who gave particular leukocytes to allow the development of an anti-cancer drug. He has been totally excluded from all that is the valuation of his “gift”, namely patents, profits, etc.
Neoliberal individualism seems to place the individual at the center, as if everything were put at his service, to better render him responsible and guilty of the defects of an economic system over which he has no real hold. A system that puts a majority of poor (who come to sell organs, tissues, gametes, in addition to their work force) to serve the few rich who can pay and have a personalized medicine … Various strategies are put in place to recover and exploit all that is ethical and humane, including giving . But it is always the poor who give (or sell at a price close to zero), such as poor women who rationalize the rent of their bodies in surrogacy, oocyte donation, etc., under the pretext of helping rich women. The ideology arrives to present such acts as a valorization: such a saleswoman would thus have more value … A value almost null on the market, and a work force obviously so little valorized that they must put even their bodies in sale or rental. As for prevention and the preventive medicine triad , predictive medicine, prescriptive / proscriptive medicine (in the ethical sense, thus specifying the role of social control agent exercised by medicine), I have addressed them in the articles on this subject ( “prevention, abuse of prevention”), based on Sackett’s criticisms, but also in the theoretical context of the writings of Critical Theory, Michel Foucault, Ivan Illich and others. A book that I particularly recommend is Céline Lafontaine’s Le Corps-marché. The commercialization of human life in the era of the bioeconomy (Seuil 2014).
A summary of the critical positions on preventive medicine and the triad as well as other references are in my 2012 presentation already cited dealing with the misuse of the social function of medicine. Elena Pasca
