Growth Hormones

So how tall do you want to be...

Susan Cohen's book Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height gives us insight into the possible impacts of growth hormones in our society and their burden. The book was recently reviewed by the New York Times by Abigail Bigail Zuger, M.D. for all you lazy bums, not concerned about the faith of your society.

She presents the argument that the medical industry is increasing playing a role in molding the standards for height. They do so by introducing new growth hormones that have the potential do change what is normal. Many of these drugs came to full use after WWII, originally used lessen deficiencies in sick children. Then... “Glandward ho!... the great idea came about that these drugs could be used for healthy children too.

So how tall would you want your kid to be? In '7os parents started giving their daughters DES, a synthetic estrogen, in order to hasten puberty and prevent that heinous outcome of having a daughter that is a bit taller than "normal." The cost was cancer. In 1971, a federal safety warning stressed the clear cancer link.

n 1985, a new synthetic human growth hormone was introduce with little risk of caner and capable of treating not just those with pituitary-deficient, but all those slightly shorter than the norm. The cost was $50,000 per putative inch gained.

Issues about the medicalization of the body are critical to disability understand and policy making. Who will carry the financial burden of such drugs? Are these drugs cosmetic or important for the proper functioning of individual's in our society. In regards to the current healthcare debates that may emerge that may occur in your world, I earge your policy makers to turn to sustainable definitions of disability that properly build healthy foundations for tomorrow's medical and cultural norms. Yet coming up with such definitions can become increasingly difficult. As Robert Aronowitz demonstrats in Making Sense of Illness: Science, Society, and Disease., disease definitions are influenced by the a combination of physicians, researchers, and policy makers interests and are not inammenable biological statments, disconnected from their cultural norms.

The One & The Only,

Funky Winkerbean (Kian Adabi)