Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Puberty in crisis? Sex, reproduction and the loss of future
- 2 Articulating findings, feelings and figurations: methods and approaches
- 3 Telling histories: the scientific study of puberty
- 4 Defining early onset puberty: troubling findings about sexual development
- 5 Causes and explanations: genes, fat, toxins and families
- 6 Consequences of early development: sex, drugs and shortness
- 7 Treatments: pharmaceuticals, sex and suffering
- Conclusion: Folding puberty differently: changing findings, feeling and figurations
- References
- Index
7 - Treatments: pharmaceuticals, sex and suffering
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2015
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Puberty in crisis? Sex, reproduction and the loss of future
- 2 Articulating findings, feelings and figurations: methods and approaches
- 3 Telling histories: the scientific study of puberty
- 4 Defining early onset puberty: troubling findings about sexual development
- 5 Causes and explanations: genes, fat, toxins and families
- 6 Consequences of early development: sex, drugs and shortness
- 7 Treatments: pharmaceuticals, sex and suffering
- Conclusion: Folding puberty differently: changing findings, feeling and figurations
- References
- Index
Summary
If you have a normal girl, a girl who's 8 or 9, there's a big ethical issue of giving them medicine. Giving them medicine says, ‘Something is wrong with your body,’ as opposed to, ‘This is your body, and let's all find a way to accept it.’
(paediatric endocrinologist Louise Greenspan, quoted in Weil 2012)The pharmaceutical company webpage advertising Lupron Depot injections for ‘Central Precocious Puberty (CPP)’ depicts a beautiful blonde girl of about 6 or 7 in a hot pink blouse smiling toothily to camera (www.lupron.com/). The medication – leuprolide acetate in depot suspension – was originally manufactured by Illinois-based Abbott Pharmaceuticals, tag line ‘A Promise for Life’ (www.abbott. com/index.htm) but now belongs to AbbVie, a new company formed when Abbott split in two in 2013. Abbott was formally part of Takeda-Abbott Pharmaceuticals, an American-Japanese group who claimed to ‘Turn Science into Caring’. Lupron is used to treat several conditions, all of which are advertised here in a matching style: readers can click on a photo of a handsome man to read about prostate cancer or one of two glamorous women to find out more about endometriosis and fibroids. Clicking through to the pages on early puberty (or CPP), readers access definitions of the condition, information about symptoms and tests, and guidance about the medication and how to talk to children about early development. More spectacularly pretty children are pictured, with and without adoring mothers alongside them. Clicking on a flower icon for girls or a sailing boat icon for boys, parents can enter data to create a monitoring chart on which to track their child's progress once on Lupron and to record visits to clinicians. Clicking on a dollar sign icon, they are offered an ‘Instant Savings Card’ which will ‘Save up to $150 off each LUPRON DEPOT-PED prescription (after a $10 co-pay expense)’ for monthly injections or ‘up to $1,000 off each LUPRON DEPOT-PED prescription (after a $10 co-pay expense)’ for 3-monthly injections. Such savings, visitors are told, can be of the order of $2,000 per year. Clicking on an icon of a phone, parents can ‘talk live to a nurse’ by calling a toll-free hotline.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Puberty in CrisisThe Sociology of Early Sexual Development, pp. 197 - 227Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2015