Medicalization
Medicalization is studied from a sociologic perspective in terms of the role and power of professionals, patients, and corporations, and also for its implications for ordinary people whose self-identity and life decisions may depend on the prevailing concepts of health and illness.
[1] The term medicalization entered the sociology literature in the 1970s in the works of Irving Zola, Peter Conrad and Thomas Szasz, among others.
According to Eric Cassell's book, The Nature of Suffering and the Goals of Medicine (2004), the expansion of medical social control is being justified as a means of explaining deviance.
However, these authors took the view that increasingly sophisticated technology had extended the potential reach of medicalization as a form of social control, especially in terms of "psychotechnology" (Chorover,1973).
They argued that medicine disguised the underlying causes of disease, such as social inequality and poverty, and instead presented health as an individual issue.
[14] Although it has received less attention, it is claimed that masculinity has also faced medicalization, being deemed damaging to health and requiring regulation or enhancement through drugs, technologies or therapy.
[15] Specifically, erectile dysfunction was once considered a natural part of the aging process in men, but has since been medicalized as a problem, late-onset hypogonadism.
[17] For many years, marginalized psychiatrists (such as Peter Breggin, Paula Caplan, Thomas Szasz) and outside critics (such as Stuart A. Kirk) have "been accusing psychiatry of engaging in the systematic medicalization of normality".
[20]: 70 As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances.
[22]: 1 [23] Innumerable other conditions such as obesity, smoking cigarettes, draft malingering, bachelorhood, divorce, unwanted pregnancy, kleptomania, and grief, have been declared diseases by medical and psychiatric authorities.
The authors noted: Inappropriate medicalisation carries the dangers of unnecessary labelling, poor treatment decisions, iatrogenic illness, and economic waste, as well as the opportunity costs that result when resources are diverted away from treating or preventing more serious disease.
Medical doctors Petr Shkrabanek and James McCormick wrote a series of publications on this topic in the late 1980s and early 1990s criticizing the UK's Health of The Nation campaign.
Titles such as "The making of a disease"[32] or "Sex, drugs, and marketing"[33] critique the pharmaceutical industry for shunting everyday problems into the domain of professional biomedicine.
[38]: 497 This has been attributed to the commodification of healthcare and the role of parties other than doctors such as insurance companies, the pharmaceutical industry, and the government, referred to collectively as countervailing powers.
Examples of this direct marketing are visits by salespeople, funding of journals, training courses or conferences, incentives for prescribing, and the routine provision of "information" written by the pharmaceutical company.
In response to theory based on medicalisation being insufficient to explain social processes, some scholars have developed a concept of biomedicalization which argues that technical and scientific interventions are transforming medicine.
