Narratives of Willpower; Narratives of Disease [Snippets 3]

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“We’re transitioning from the personal failure, lacking willpower, lacking self-control narrative, to this narrative that says ‘Obesity is a disease, you need a prescribed cure’ … so we can sell weight-loss medication”.

(Marquisele Mercedes, quoted in Kuchler, 2022).

The context for this quote from Marquisele Mercedes, a doctoral student in public health at Brown University in Providence, Rhode island, is a discussion of what might be called the ‘obesity crisis’: by 2030, nearly 50% of Americans are expected to be obese; worldwide, rates of obesity have tripled since 1975, such that there were 650 million obese adults in 2016, according to the World Health Organisation. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) concluded in 2019 that developed countries’ plans to tackle obesity were, for the most part, failing.

Discourse provocation: The design of pharmaceutical drugs is a specific kind of design practice whose success is measured by particular intended health outcomes, in relation to the risk of particular unintended side-effects; in other words, by the drug’s ‘performance’. What are the parameters of drug design? Are they circumscribed by ‘medical’ criteria solely? How widely is the ‘circle of ‘medical’ criteria drawn, for example, does it stop at the limit of the pharmacokinetic phase, including the processes of absorption, distribution and clearance, and the pharmacodynamic phase, including the interaction of a drug with its target, such as receptors, enzymes and the like?

Reference

Kuchler, H. (2022). Wonder drug. Financial Times Weekend Magazine, July 16/17, pp.24-33