MEDICALIZATION AND THE CREATION OF NEW DISEASES AND NEW DISORDERS

Farmacia hospitalaria : organo oficial de expresion cientifica de la Sociedad Espanola de Farmacia Hospitalaria, 2018

Medicalization is a concern to which we have been paying attention intermittently for the past half century. However, it is increasingly difficult to look away from its multiple and ubiquitous manifestations, and therefore there is an increasingly higher number of analysis and studies about them, from the most varied perspectives, not only by healthcare literature, but also with the great contribution by social sciences such as Anthropology or Sociology.Based on previous publications, this article offers an updated review on life medicalization in the European setting, highlighting particularly those situations where a medication is the main vehicle for medicalization. This demands a careful exploration of the "pharmaceuticalization" concept, which appeared in the past decade, and which many of the research projects with these characteristics intend to embrace.The decentralized nature of the decisions on diagnosis and treatment requires an agreement of healthcare ...

Social medicalization diminishes or even destroys the population's autonomy regarding disease and healthcare and generates an endless demand on health services. It consists on an important challenge the SUS (Unified Health System). This article discusses the limits of biomedical knowledge and practices in relation to their contribution to the promotion of users' autonomy and proposes some guidelines for handling these limits. It comes to the conclusion that intervention technologies, biomedical knowledge and its cognitive procedures contribute very little to patients' autonomy. The article suggests a shift of the biomedical knowledge's meanings, focused on the healing function of health professionals. This shift should be regarded as a mission to rebuild autonomy, prevent and heal the lived sicknesses, beside the ones that are diagnosed. It defends a reorganization of primary care biomedical clinic's values and goals, such as the diagnosis' relativity, the end of disease and risk ontology, the end of the control obsession, the fight against biomedical dogmatism, and giving priority to therapeutics.

International Journal of Health Science

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From psychological practice with adults and children, it becomes possible to observe fundamental elements that focus upon contemporary culture and raise investigations with the intent of bringing greater subsidies to the practice. Among the current relevant factors for the constitution of subjectivities, medicalization stands out for being an extension of the domain of medicine to other fields of knowledge. Medical treatments for human behaviors and suffering have been seen as something normal, commonplace and even a synonym for progress, technology and innovation. However, the generalized use of psychotropic drugs also exposes the artificialization of the human mind and body, placing in question the frontiers between nature and culture. Thus, this study seeks to present the concept of medicalization, highlighting the importance of the iatrogenic effects of medical treatment.

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.

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.

MEDICALIZATION OF LIFE: CRITICAL THINKING OF HEALTH ACTION FROM THE MEDICALIZATION OF LIFE (Atena Editora), 2023

This article aims to think about different aspects that surround the phenomenon of medicalization, considering the health-disease process and the pathologization of life. The theoretical construction was based on critical perspectives that questioned attitudes and ways of thinking about the medicalization/pathologization of life, which are crystallized in society in the form of its most diverse norms for classifying health and normality. The process of medicalization/pathologization of life is growing not only in Brazil, but throughout the world, a topic that needs to be discussed with due caution so as not to spread practices linked to medicalization. For this study, a bibliographical review was carried out, with the purpose of obtaining and analyzing information in a qualitative way, presenting discussions thinking about the performance of the various areas of health, including psychology, where medicalization is delineated and defined, addressing aspects aimed at criticism social control, health and disease processes and the capitalist system as having a strong influence on the processes of medicalization/pathologization.

The present paper aims to analyse the medicalization processes in its role as a high-profile theme of the contemporary society, as it is being linked to developments in various fields such as science (biomedicine, cloning, genetically modified organisms), technology (new genetic biotechnologies, nanotechnologies) and communication. We are interested in identifying the social mechanisms that lead people to give a medical approach to those aspects of their lives that normally are unrelated to medical phenomena, and therefore studying, from a communicative perspective, the interactions between actors involved in the medicalization of life. We explore the topic using the SWOT analysis as a tool to (a) identify weak and strong points of such processes, and (b) evaluate the threats and opportunities incurred. The analysis reveals that medicalization can lead to undesired stratifications within a society, marginalization, and " patologization of existence ". On a positive note, it can enhance the patient – doctor relation when the communication processes between the actors involved (medical care institutions, pharmaceutical industry, mass-media, administrative and political authorities, and surveillance organizations) are improved.

British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology, 2021

Pharmaceutical industry and drugs advertisement is sometimes accused of "creating diseases". This article assesses and describes the role of that industry in fostering medicalization. First, the notions of medicalization and pharmaceuticalization are defined. Then, the problem of distinguishing between harmful overmedicalization and well-founded medicalization is presented. Next, the phenomenon of disease mongering is explained and illustrated by the case analysis of medicalizing pain and suffering in three contexts: 1) the general idea of medicalizing physical pain, 2) the medicalization of grief, and 3) disease mongering of pseudoaddiction-a condition promoted in order to increase the demand for opioid pain relievers.

Social Change Review, 2014

The aim of this paper is to analyse the sociological literature on pharmaceuticalisation and see how sociology helps us understand and explain the phenomenon. We then discuss how sociology, especially in Anglo-Saxon countries, defines the process of pharmaceuticalisation and how this last is evolving. The paper points out that, while medicalisation remains a key concept for health sociology, it is increasingly being queried and/or extended to allow for a techno-scientific era of biomedicalisation (Clarke et al. 2003) and to acknowledge the importance of the pharmaceutical industry in this process (Williams, Martin and Gabe 2011a, 2011b). Particular attention will be paid to the process of pharmaceuticalisation as brought about not just by doctors and their prescriptions, but by the central role of pharmaceutical promoters and the marketing of drugs.