Medicalization
From ArticleWorld
Medicalization refers to a contemporary tendency to expand the reach and perspective of (usually Western) medicine. In medical sociology and anthropology medicalization describes the process whereby aspects of human life and behaviour previously considered personality-driven or socially and culturally mediated become medical conditions.
Contents |
Medicine as social control
Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder and menopause are examples of sets of behaviour and 'natural' phenomena that have come under the medical rubric to be managed, explained, and often controlled. Medicalization is seen as a form of social control. As more and more behaviours, tendencies, and normally occurring, if sometimes unpleasant, conditions are treated as symptoms or syndromes to be diagnosed, the power of the medical establishment is thought to increase disproportionately.
Medicine and non-western cultures
Critics frequently point to the surge in diagnoses of psychological and psychiatric syndromes, and their controversial treatment with pharmaceutical drugs as a key indicator of the medicalization of Western society.
Medicalization is also of interest in the process of individuals reconciling faith in older medial practices, such as Ayurveda, Unani, or traditional Chinese medicine, with modern diagnostic and treatment processes, often called biomedicine.
Public health consequences
Medicalization also refers to the process of managing public health and sickness in populations without taking into consideration their cultural context. Anthropologists point to the numerous different cultural meanings of illness and note that the disease paradigm flattens what people in different parts of the world perceive as the root causes of their poor health. Around the world people describe illness as more than just disease, but in terms of a complex concatenation of personal, social, religious, even past-life and literally spirit-driven causes and consequences. In delivering public health, obliviousness to these factors often makes drives such as smallpox eradication, for example (smallpox is commonly seen to be the manifestation of a goddess's anger) very hard carry out successfully.
In addition, medicalization drives up the cost of healthcare for society as a whole.
Positive aspects
It is also argued that medicalization is a force for the positive, since it makes people aware of wellness and good health beyond just diagnosis and treatment. This is sometimes called paramedicalization.