The Human Body as Field of Conflict between Discourses

Ageing and Society, 1995

Social Science & Medicine, 1987

This paper raises the question of the ethically proper balance in health care policy between the medical-clinical-high technology model of health service and the grass-roots, community based or traditional models of care. Paradoxical imblances between the two approaches are traced to political, economic or prestige factors. Case studies examined include the hospitalization of non-contagious leprosy patients while protecting the anonymity of AIDS-infected prostitutes, medical resistance to the adoption of a clinical role by Community Cancer Centers, and the continued preference in some quarters for elaborate (and often delayed) hospital treatment for such problems as infant diarrhea, despite the availability of much simpler solutions, as in the case of the widely successful oral rehydration therapy.

2017

Van Dijk et al describe how society's influence on medicine drives both medicalisation and overdiagnosis, and allege that a major political and ethical concern regarding our increasingly interpreting the world through a biomedical lens is that it serves to individualise and depoliticize social problems. I argue that for medicalisation to serve this purpose, it would have to exclude the possibility of also considering problems in other (social or political) terms; but to think that medical descriptions of the world seek to or are able to do this is to misunderstand the purpose and function of model construction in science in general, and medicine in particular. So, if medicalisation is nonetheless used for the depoliticization described by many critics, we must ask what society does with medicine to give it this exclusive authority. I propose that the problem arises from a tendency to mistake the map for the territory, and think a tool to understand certain aspects of the world gives us the complete picture. To resist this process, I suggest health workers should be more open about the purpose and limitations of medicalisation, and the value of alternative descriptions of different aspects of human experience.

Aporia, 2011

. Socio-economic Inequities and the Health Sector, 2014

Medicalization, an international phenomenon for some time now, has been responsible for proliferation of diseases and prescription of medical solutions by increasingly extending the medical categories to multiple aspects of people's lives. It has been further encouraged by pharmaceuticalization, biomedicalization and geneticization. Medicine still holds the centre stage in the process of medicalization but, along with it, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industries, the health-care markets and the aspirations of human desire, rather than a quest for health, have been accountable for the medicalization and overmedicalization of society. A deleterious result of disregarding the social context of complicated problems and educating people that non-diseases are diseases, have resulted in an increase in consumption of unnecessary drugs and diagnostic procedures. The possibility of meaningful health care reforms has therefore become problematical, especially in 'a pill for every ill' cultural disposition that is created, promoted and sustained by unbridled medicalization.

Medicine has traditionally been seen as a problem for democratic theory. This paper suggests that it is also an opportunity. Medicine appears as primarily a problem for democracy when it is understood in the usual terms of expert knowledge and material distribution. It appears additionally as an opportunity if it is understood differently, in terms of recognition – that equality of respect which democrats cherish. We will see the politics of medicine as a politics of recognition if we attend to the phenomenon of medicalization. Medicalization is a social process in which non-medical problems are reconceived as medical problems. My argument is that recognition is what is politically at stake in this process, as medicalization can both grant and deny respect. Medicalization as a struggle for recognition is an attempt to “reduce insult to injury.” This reduction is complex and easily backfires, producing misrecognition and insult.

Societies

Medicalization has been a key concept in the field of the sociology of health and illness over the past 50 years, capturing the expanding social control of everyday life by medical experts [...]

This article attempts to outline a history of the critique of medicalization that developed in the 1960s in the work of Thomas Szasz, R. D. Laing, Michael Foucault, and others that was applied in their work to medical and psychiatric theory and practice, the penal system, and public health systems. This article follows the development of Foucault's own work on "governmentality" that emphasized the individualization and internalization of the themes of medicalization and the application of these ideas by his disciples to contemporary medical developments. Finally, the author explores recent historiography in the history of medicine and public health that supports this thesis of individualization that both undermines and reconfigures the older notion of medicalization. ᭧ 2003 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Sociology of Health and Illness, 1981

Medicalization has been one of the most important topics for feminist agenda and gender studies. During the second wave of feminism, when sexual and reproductive rights were the top concerns for women, is exactly when the studies of medicalization started to grow. The goal of this research is to present some characteristics of the studies that are concerned with the gendered medicalized body by indicating how the medicalization process has been explained, understood and interlaced with different institutions and people. One main concern in this review is to pay attention to how gender is expressed in medicalization studies. Within a qualitative design, and the support of SPSS™, we constructed a mapping review on the literature published in books, and thereafter we developed a content analysis of the chapters on medicalization. An overview of the characteristics of the studies are presented, and after two categories are discussed: (a) meanings of medicalization and (b) medicalizing bodies and its entrepreneurs: a rhizomatic expression. It was concluded the medicalization thesis should be considered as one line of a "rhizome" that connects to different actors, corporations and organizations. In deconstructing the rhizome, the analytical category gender should be understood as a socio-historical construction related to relations of domination and to resistance as well. Also, the medicalization authors should be sensitive to the epistemologies of the Global South. Key words: health, mapping review, medicalizing bodies, social medicine, sociology of health. Resumen La medicalización ha sido uno de los temas más importantes para la agenda feminista y para los estudios de género. Durante la segunda ola del feminismo, cuando los derechos sexuales y reproductivos eran las principales preocupaciones para las mujeres, es el momento exacto en cual los estudios sobre la medicalización comenzaron a aumentar. El objetivo de esta investigación es presentar algunas características de los estudios relacionados con el cuerpo medicalizado y generizado, indicando cómo se ha explicado, entendido y entrelazado el proceso de medicalización con diferentes instituciones y personas. Una preocupación principal en esta revisión es prestar atención a cómo se expresa el género en los estudios de medicalización. Dentro de un diseño cualitativo, y con el apoyo de SPSS™, construimos una revisión preliminar sobre la literatura publicada en libros, y luego desarrollamos un análisis de contenido de los capítulos sobre medicalización. Se presenta una descripción general de las características de los estudios, y después se discuten dos categorías: (a) los significados de la medicalización y (b) los cuerpos medicalizados y sus emprendedores: una expresión rizomática. Se concluyó que la tesis de medicalización debería considerarse como la línea de un "rizoma" que se conecta con diferentes actores, corporaciones y organizaciones. Al deconstruir el rizoma, la categoría analítica del género debe entenderse como una construcción sociohistórica relacionada con las relaciones de dominación y también con las de resistencia. Además, los autores que tratan sobre la medicalización deben ser sensibles a las epistemologías del Sur Global. Palabras clave: Salud, revisión preliminar, cuerpos medicalizados, medicina social, sociología de la salud. Sumario

Вестник Саратовского государственного технического университета. 2011. №4 (60). Вып.2. С.256-263., 2011

Статья посвящена вопросу о социокультурной гегемонии медицины в современном обществе, которая рассматривается с помощью понятия «медикализация». Анализируются идеи ряда западных исследователей, обсуждавших этот вопрос в 1970-2000-е годы, а также эволюция этих идей. The article is devoted to the issue of social and cultural hegemony of medicine in modern society, which is considered by the term «medicalization». The ideas of a number of Western scholars who discussed the issue in the 1970-2000's are analysed, as well as the evolution of these ideas.

isara solutions, 2017

In most broad terms, medical practice might be said to be situated to adapting to the unsettling influence of the health of the person that is with the 'disease' or affliction's and positively decided by the measures of any definition, health of the individual is one of the utilitarian pre-requirements of a general public, so that from the perspective of the 'working' of the social framework, too low a general degree of health or excessively high and occurrence of sickness is broken on the grounds that ailment meddles with the viable execution of social jobs.

İstanbul Üniversitesi Sosyoloji Dergisi, 2023

Sociological research on medicine was initially conducted by locating physicians as the key decision-makers on health-related issues. This approach, which was furnished by the assumptions of the postwar sociology of professions, has led to a medical sociology that has rather limited space for the patient's role in the health care process. With the emergence of a critical stance towards experts and the entire technocratic edifice of modern societies in the 1960s, medicine's role in society became a key issue of discussion, and physicians were once again located at the forefront of the analyses on the process of medicalization, which denotes the expansion of medicine's jurisdiction in terms of determining the "right" way of living. The medicalization process and the key role physicians play in it were questioned from the 1980s onward with new studies in medical sociology which started to pay more attention to the role of bureaucratization and commercialization of health care, patients' influence in medicalization and the increasing influence of technoscientific advancements in shaping medical practice and our conception of health and disease in general. These new concerns have brought about new theories like biomedicalization and pharmaceuticalization, with which physicians have started to wither away in medical sociology.

MEDICALIZATION AS THE PHENOMENON THAT CONTROLS SOCIETY: AN INTEGRATIVE REVIEW (Atena Editora), 2022

Introduction: The medicalization process is difficult for society to understand. Objective: with the aim of understanding the perception of Brazilian researchers in relation to the phenomenon of medicalization of society, this study was carried out based on the analysis of the scientific production of the last ten years on this subject. Methods: This is an integrative review, in the Scielo, Bireme, Pubmed and Google Scholar databases using “medicalization” or “medicalization of society” as descriptors. From this search, 37 articles were found. Results: The search in the databases and analysis of the articles was carried out from November 2018 to January 2019. From this analysis of the 37 articles obtained, the sample was composed of 27 articles after the delimitation determined by the inclusion criteria and exclusion of articles and removal of articles obtained repeatedly from more than one database. Discussion: Data were subdivided into subtopics for better understanding. Medicalization as a strategy for pain, medicalization and sexuality, medicalization and the health and disease process. Conclusion: From the analysis of the articles, it was observed that although medicalization has its origin in the seventeenth century, it is a phenomenon that affects contemporary society and is still insufficiently addressed by researchers.