How Healing Became a Commodity – Part I: The Story of Soap

[Guest guest]

 

    What we spend on health care now represents 17 percent of the U.S. gross

domestic product.  It is the single largest sector of the U.S. economy.   The

Congressional Budget Office says that health care costs will reach 25% of GNP by

2025 under current trends.

 

    Health wasn't always such an article of commercial consumption. Once upon

a time, health was less a " thing " , and more of a deeply personal, even spiritual

practice.  In many realms of natural health, these features remain today.

 

    We're curious about how health became such a fundamental commodity in the

marketplace.  As silly as it may seem, let's consider the history of soap as a

metaphor of sorts that sheds some light on how this happened.  

 

    Beginning with the American Revolution, and continuing with the westward

move across the continent, the American spirit was fiercely independent and

self-reliant.  An especially simple example was that family soap was made and

used almost exclusively at home through most of the 1800's.  In a sense,

soap-making was one of the simplest forms of autonomous health care.  

 

    Advertising changed this. Few people know that the soap business was one

of the first industries to use large-scale advertising beginning in the late

1800's.  Soap manufacturers set out to mold the American experience so that

consumers needed to buy - not make their own - soap.  They built an advertising

strategy centered on the connection between physical health and spiritual

wellness, with an embedded message that only industrially-produced pure soap

could provide that connection.  For instance, one early advertisement featured

cherubs bathing with a large bar of soap.  Another included a testimonial from

the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher in 1870:  " If cleanliness is next to Godliness,

then surely soap is a means of grace. " [Lears, Jackson, Fables of Abundance: A

Cultural History of Advertising in America, Pantheon Books, 1981]

 

    The rest is history.  Now, we're not suggesting that we return to the

days of making our own soap as a way of escaping the advertising matrix.  Yet,

this story shows how advertising deeply penetrated one of the simplest forms of

personal health care and transformed it forever.  It also reveals that the

fundamental goal of advertisers is not just to sell a product.  It's to create

a need, to establish that commerce holds the expertise to meet that need, and to

maintain consumer dependence on that expertise.  

 

    This is Advertising 101.  In fact, next time you're watching t.v. or

flipping through a magazine, keep an eye out for health care ads - drugs ads

especially.  The basic method hasn't changed much.  Instead of cherubs

washing, you're apt to see people waltzing through pristine fields. It's just

another way of connecting physical health to inner wellbeing.

 

    We're all for the connection between physical health and inner

well-being. But we serve ourselves by paying better attention to whose hand

controls that connection.  And we have to ask whether turning health into a

commodity is the best way to foster that connection.

 

    The advertising business hasn't accomplished the task of turning health

into a commodity all by itself. Orthodox law and science have helped.  We'll

explore that in Part II coming up soon.

 

    In the meantime, be well.

 

    Coming Soon:

 

How Healing Became a Commodity - Part II:  The " Ownership " Dilemma

 

 

How Healing Became a Commodity - Part III:  The Cost and the Cure

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