title: Dis-ease or disease?: ontological rarefaction in the medical-industrial complex.
abstract: Recent scholarship in medical humanities has expressed strong concern over the ability of pharmaceuticals companies to medicalize discomfort and subsequently invent diseases. In this article, I explore the clinical debates over the ontology of the sinus headache as a possible counter-case. Extending Foucault's concept of principles or rarefaction, this paper documents the efforts of clinicians to resist the pharmaceutically-provided understanding of the sinus headache. In so doing, it offers institutions of rarefaction and rarefactive assemblages as useful heuristics for the exploration of disease legitimization discourse.
authors.affiliation: Iowa State University, Ames, USA. grahamss@iastate.edu
authors.forename: S Scott
authors.initials: SS
authors.lastname: Graham
mesh_terms: D003933:Diagnosis; D004194:Disease; D017277:Drug Approval; D004345:Drug Industry; D006261:Headache / Q000188:drug therapy / Q000209:etiology; D049674:History, 21st Century; D006801:Humans; D040541:Marketing; D008513:Medicine in Literature; D010254:Paranasal Sinus Diseases / Q000150:complications / Q000175:diagnosis / Q000188:drug therapy; D010686:Philosophy, Medical; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D014481:United States