Manipulating Science for the Promotion of Viagra

Medical treatment is by definition an invested business - its basic design presumes financial investment and gains coupled with patients seen as nothing more than customers. This book's core argument is that the unprecedented success of Viagra worldwide is not the result of an exciting, compassionate scientific breakthrough bringing relief to the desperate or dying. Rather, commercial interests have created a socially desirable but medically limited product -ironically, by denying the fundamentally social nature of sex. By reducing sex to penile performance, then equating penile performance with masculine identity, a man's self-worth and social worth are reduced to the hardness and sustainability of his erections. The book's approach is the clear illustration of the medicalization of discontent facilitated by the passage of legislation permitting direct-to-consumer drug advertising, online drug sales, and the entanglement of health professionals and drug marketers.