When Medicine Was Just Marketing

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes.

In the early twentieth century, Bayer made something from morphine. They called it Heroin. Not because it was a drug, but because it genuinely seemed effective against coughs, pain, fatigue. They sold it as a cough remedy. For children. For housewives. For what you’d now call addiction, they called: medicine.

This feels absurd from here. But it’s no more absurd than what we accept now. The same Bayer later made aspirin. This was genuinely safe. But they marketed it for things it wasn’t meant for. For menstrual cramps. For melancholy. For normal human discomfort.

What happens here is this: a company discovers something that works, and then invents problems it can solve. This is called medicalization. A human process becomes a disease. A symptom becomes a disorder. A company now needs a product, so it creates a market.

This happens now still. Medicine for marginal cholesterol. Ritalin for children who are just being childish. Statins for every risk. Sleep medicine instead of sleep hygiene. The companies probably genuinely believe in their products. But they also have incentives to believe. Every pill you take is money.

My father had strong ideas about this. Medicine has a place, he said. But that place is much smaller than the industry wants. Antibiotics save lives. Surgery fixes bones. But much of what we medicalize is preventable through nutrition, movement, sleep. This doesn’t deserve a pill. It deserves a different life.

This is not anti-medical. This is pro-health. The best medicine is one you don’t need. This means eating well. This means moving. This means arranging your life so you can be healthy without pills.

What strikes me in Bayer’s history with heroin is not that they were wrong, but how easily we accept things as medicine when companies package them that way. Medical authority gets power over what is normal. And norms can change. Always in the direction that’s profitable.

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Sources: Bayer medical history, pharmaceutical documentation, preventive medicine