The Medicalisation of Menstruation: Its Scope and Limits

Abstract

Conventional western medicine has very determinately ‘technologized’ its approach to health 
and the human body. While there are many benefits evinced from this conventional orienta
tion, there are also disconcerting liabilities. One dimension of the emergent problem is that 
while medical science is quick to extol the virtues of its chemical and surgical discoveries, 
it is irreconcilably slow in recanting the indiscretions of their adverse side effects. Lamenta
bly, there exists an imbalance in the level of propaganda dominance of conventional medicine 
that marginalises the legitimate role which alternative medicine is actually capable of playing 
within the traditional medical framework. This phenomenon represents an imbalance which 
badly needs to be redressed. Although, there is no doubt that conventional medicine makes an 
enormously valuable contribution to health, it is salutary to remind everyone that it does not 
provide a complete approach to health. Without understanding the value of the philosophical 
foundations of alternative modalities of healing, the potential of conventional medical treat
ment is self-stultifying. When a health issue arises, for example, the professional medical reply 
is all too often tantamount to a technological response, whereby normal physiological functions 
such as observable discrepancies in hormonal rhythms and menstrual cycle lengths become 
medicalised and prescriptively regulated by years, or even a lifetime of drug therapy.