The female body medicated and silenced: gender and performance

Medicines in our society are embedded in a dualistic perspective involving good and evil, the to cure and to cause disease. Thus, health professionals, when dealing with medicines, encounter this dilemma. However, in healthcare it is not always that this dualism is analyzed from the perspective of society, creating a biased view from the pharmaceutical laboratory, leading to the imposition of this on other issues related to medicine comnsumption. From this perspective, from a study conducted with elderly women patients in a psychiatric outpatient clinic in the city of Ribeir o Preto, SP/Brazil, it was sought to analyze the consumption of drugs within the pharmacological class of benzodiazepines and their relationships in the social life of these users. From this, it was found that benzodiazepines, in addition to being used as a pharmacological product, can also be comprehended as a mechanism of power, silencing social issues.