Medicines, performance-enhancing consumption and therapeutic cultures: a process of change

Abstract

This article focuses on the use of pharmaceutical drugs and natural products to manage personal performance — i.e. the consumption of performance-enhancing substances, or what the authors refer to as performance-enhancing consumption. This in turn serves as the basis for an analytical reflection on the change in therapeutic cultures. Taking the current issue of pharmaceuticalisation and the role of the natural in the expanding use of medicines as their points of reference, the authors show that the pharmaceuticalisation of daily life is also emerging in fields other than just health, giving rise to new logics in people’s relationships with this type of resource. The empirical basis for this approach was a national study on the consumption of performance-enhancing substances among the youth population in Portugal.