On good and bad forms of medicalization

Pharmaceuticals or other emerging technologies could be used to enhance (or diminish) feelings of lust, attraction, and attachment in adult romantic partnerships. While such interventions could conceivably be used to promote individual (and couple) well-being, their widespread development and/or adoption might lead to “medicalization” of human love and heartache—for some, a source of serious concern. In this essay, we argue that the “medicalization of love” need not necessarily be problematic, on balance, but could plausibly be expected to have either good or bad consequences depending upon how it unfolds. By anticipating some of the specific ways in which these technologies could yield unwanted outcomes, bioethicists and others can help direct the course of love’s “medicalization”—should it happen to occur—more toward the “good” side than the “bad.”

Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, 2016

In 2015, we published an article entitled “The Medicalization of Love,” in which we argued that both good and bad consequences could be expected to follow from love’s medicalization, depending upon how the process unfolded. A flurry of commentaries followed; here we offer some preliminary thoughts in reply to the more substantial of the criticisms that were raised. We focus in particular on the nature of love itself as well as the role it plays (or should play) in our lives; we also touch on a number of practical issues concerning the likely effects of any plausible “real life” love drugs, and conclude with a call for careful regulation.

Over the past decades technological innovations such as digital technologies, genomics, and bio-nanotechnology have been promoted as means of improving “health”, a term that was broadly defined by the World Health Organization in 1946 as “a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” Access to “molecules of life”, miniaturized diagnostic devices or health-related connected objects have greatly intensified and accelerated the pace of production, circulation and sharing of health data, thereby reconfiguring the traditional relationship between medicine and society. While “biomedicalization” is often used as a term of reference to describe this social phenomenon, we choose to refer to the concept of “healthism” (“santéisme” in French) as it underscores the current development and dissemination of individual practices of biomedical techniques. People’s engagement with, or even appropriation of, new medical technologies and knowledge, both inside and outside medical institutions, have led to the opening of frontier zones of expertise and to the development of borderline practices, half-way between medicine and self-care, resulting in the multiplication of patient figures across biomedical platforms, processes and technologies. These major shifts in medical practices require a critical examination. Healthism must also be questionned if we are to gain a better view of the reconfiguration of the body and life through science and technology today.

Published in: "Existential Medicine: Essays on Health and Illness", ed. Kevin Aho, Rowman and Littlefield, pp. 131-144, 2018. New medical technologies are increasingly transforming the meaning patterns of everyday life. This development has only begun, and within the discipline of biomedical ethics philosophers are presently examining the ethical challenges that future medical ‘enhancement’ technologies will bring. This is important work: our ability to handle new technologies – and not let the technologies handle us – will be decisive for the society to come. However, in these analyses, phenomenology is too rarely brought into play in any substantive way to understand how new medical technologies are changing the patterns of our everyday lives in direct ways, and also reshaping our images of life, health, personality and the good life in a more indirect manner. In the present chapter I will attempt to do so by exploring how Martin Heidegger’s phenomenological critique of modern techno-science is relevant to medical ethics, especially as concerns the issue of medicalization.

NanoEthics, 2008

With the rapid progress and considerable promise of nanobiotechnology/neurosciences there is the potential of transforming the very nature of human beings and of how humans can conceive of themselves as rational animals through technological innovations. The interface between humans and machines (neurodigital interface), can potentially alter what it means to be human, i.e., the very idea of human nature and of normal functioning will be changed. In this paper, I argue that we are potentially on the verge of a paradigm shift in terms of the ends and goals of techno-science and its applications in the biomedical sciences. In particular, the development of brain-computer interfaces could reconceptualize the very notion of what it means to be human. Hence, we should not limit our reflections of applications in terms of therapy and enhancement but also include an examination of applications aiming at the alteration of human nature. To this end I will first delineate the potential paradigm shift and then map out four distinct clusters of concerns in relation to the brain-computer interface. Finally, I argue that our moral and philosophical reflections should follow a procedural model based on managed consensus due to our pluralistic context.

. 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.

2008

This paper develops the themes of a lecture given in the context of the course on "Il pensiero della cura: i fondamenti del pensiero clinico", organized by "Medicina e persona" at the Circolo Culturale di Milano, October 12, 2006.

The Medicalization of Love' is yet another attempt by Brian Earp, Anders Sandberg and Julian Savulescu to convince us that we should support and pursue a research program whose goal it is to find out how we can modulate the physiological and neurological processes that underlie human love and relationships and thus to learn how to control the way we emotionally relate to other people: whether we feel attracted or attached to them or not, when and to what extent. In their latest contribution to the debate they argue a) that the medicalization of love that such a research program would arguably entail is, taken by itself, neither good nor bad, b) that common worries about the medicalization of love are misplaced or at least much less convincing than they may initially appear, and c) that all things considered the medicalization of love should in fact be seen as beneficial and indeed a welcome enrichment of our understanding of love.