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Medicalization is the process by which human conditions and problems come to be defined and treated as medical conditions, and thus become the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention, or treatment. Medicalization can be driven by new evidence or hypotheses about conditions; by changing social attitudes or economic considerations; or by the development of new medications or treatments.
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. Once a condition is classified as medical, a medical model of disability tends to be used in place of a social model. Medicalization may also be termed pathologization or (pejoratively) "disease mongering". Since medicalization is the social process through which a condition becomes seen as a medical disease in need of treatment, appropriate medicalization may be viewed as a benefit to human society. The identification of a condition as a disease can lead to the treatment of certain symptoms and conditions, which will improve overall quality of life.
These sociologists did not believe medicalization to be a new phenomenon, arguing that medical authorities had always been concerned with social behavior and traditionally functioned as agents of social control (Foucault, 1965; Szasz,1970; Rosen). 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).
In the 1975 book Limits to medicine: Medical nemesis (1975), Ivan Illich put forth one of the earliest uses of the term "medicalization". Illich, a philosopher, argued that the medical profession harms people through iatrogenesis, a process in which illness and social problems increase due to medical intervention. Illich saw iatrogenesis occurring on three levels: the clinical, involving serious side effects worse than the original condition; the social, whereby the general public is made docile and reliant on the medical profession to cope with life in their society; and the structural, whereby the idea of aging and dying as medical illnesses effectively "medicalized" human life and left individuals and societies less able to deal with these "natural" processes.
The concept of medicalization dovetailed with some aspects of the 1970s feminist movement. Critics such as Ehrenreich and English (1978) argued that women's bodies were being medicalized by the predominantly male medical profession. Menstruation and pregnancy had come to be seen as medical problems requiring interventions such as hysterectomies.
such as Vicente Navarro (1980) linked medicalization to an oppressive capitalist society. They argued that medicine disguised the underlying causes of disease, such as social inequality and poverty, and instead presented health as an individual issue. Others examined the power and prestige of the medical profession, including the use of terminology to mystify and of professional rules to exclude or subordinate others.
Tiago Correia (2017) offers an alternative perspective on medicalization. He argues that medicalization needs to be detached from biomedicine to overcome much of the criticism it has faced, and to protect its value in contemporary sociological debates. Building on Gadamer's hermeneutical view of medicine, he focuses on medicine's common traits, regardless of empirical differences in both time and space. Medicalization and social control are viewed as distinct analytical dimensions that in practice may or may not overlap. Correia contends that the idea of "making things medical" needs to include all forms of medical knowledge in a global society, not simply those forms linked to the established (bio)medical professions. Looking at "knowledge", beyond the confines of professional boundaries, may help us understand the multiplicity of ways in which medicalization can exist in different times and societies, and allow contemporary societies to avoid such pitfalls as "demedicalization" (through a turn towards complementary and alternative medicine) on the one hand, or the over-rapid and unregulated adoption of biomedical medicine in non-western societies on the other. The challenge is to determine what medical knowledge is present, and how it is being used to medicalize behaviors and symptoms.
The HIV/AIDS pandemic allegedly caused from the 1980s a "profound re-medicalization of sexuality". (2025). 9780520218383, University of California Press. ISBN 9780520218383 p.3Carole S. Vance "Anthropology Rediscovers Sexuality: A Theoretical Comment." Social Science and Medicine 33 (8) 875-884 1991
The diagnosis of premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) has caused some controversy when fluoxetine (also known as Prozac) was being repackaged as a PMDD therapy under the trade named Sarafem. The psychologist Peggy Kleinplatz has criticized the diagnosis as the medicalization of normal human behavior.Offman A, Kleinplatz PJ (2004). Does PMDD Belong in the DSM? Challenging the Medicalization of Women's Bodies. The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, Vol. 13 Other medicalized aspects of women's health include infertility, breastfeeding, the childbirth process, and postpartum depression.
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. (2025). 9781592130979, Temple University Press. ISBN 9781592130979 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.
According to Mike Fitzpatrick, resistance to medicalization was a common theme of the gay liberation, anti-psychiatry, and feminist movements of the 1970s, but now there is "virtually no resistance to the advance of government intrusion in lifestyle if it is deemed to be justified in terms of public health." Moreover, the pressure for medicalization now comes from society itself as well as from the government and medical professionals.
Benjamin Rush, the father of American psychiatry, claimed that Black people had black skin because they were ill with hereditary leprosy. Consequently, he considered vitiligo as a "spontaneous cure".
According to Franco Basaglia and his followers, whose approach pointed out the role of psychiatric institutions in the control and medicalization of deviant behaviors and social problems, psychiatry is used as the provider of scientific support for social control to the existing establishment, and the ensuing standards of deviance and normality brought about repressive views of discrete social groups. As scholars have long argued, governmental and medical institutions code menaces to authority as mental diseases during political disturbances.
According to Nicholas Kittrie, a number of phenomena considered "deviant", such as alcoholism, drug addiction, prostitution, pedophilia, and masturbation ("self-abuse"), were originally considered as moral, then legal, and now medical problems. 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. Due to these perceptions, peculiar deviants were subjected to moral, then legal, and now medical modes of social control. Similarly, Conrad and Schneider concluded their review of the medicalization of deviance by identifying three major paradigms that have reigned over deviance designations in different historical periods: deviance as sin; deviance as crime; and deviance as sickness.
According to Thomas Szasz, "the therapeutic state swallows up everything human on the seemingly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of health and medicine, just as the theological state had swallowed up everything human on the perfectly rational ground that nothing falls outside the province of God and religion".
Others, however, argue that in practice the process of medicalization tends to strip subjects of their social context, so they come to be understood in terms of the prevailing biomedical ideology, resulting in a disregard for overarching social causes such as unequal distribution of power and resources. A series of publications by Mens Sana Monographs have focused on medicine as a corporate capitalist enterprise.Ajai R Singh, Shakuntala A Singh, 2005, "Medicine as a corporate enterprise, patient welfare centered profession, or patient welfare centered professional enterprise?" Mens Sana Monographs, 3(2), p19-51Ajai R Singh, Shakuntala A Singh, 2005, "The connection between academia and industry", Mens Sana Monographs, 3(1), p5-35Ajai R Singh, Shakuntala A Singh, 2005, "Public welfare agenda or corporate research agenda?", Mens Sana Monographs, 3(1), p41-80.
Scholars argue that in the late 20th century transformation within the health sector in the US altered the relationship between people in the healthcare sector. (2025). 9781119633808 ISBN 9781119633808 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. The doctor remains an authority figure who prescribes pharmaceuticals to . However, in some countries, such as the US, ubiquitous direct-to-consumer advertising encourages patients to ask for particular drugs by name, thereby creating a conversation between consumer and drug company that threatens to cut the doctor out of the loop. Additionally, there is a widespread concern regarding the extent of the pharmaceutical marketing direct to doctors and other healthcare professionals. 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. The role of patients in this economy has also changed. Once regarded as passive victims of medicalization, patients can now occupy active positions as advocates, , or even agents of change.
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. One aspect is pharmaceuticalization, the influence of the use of pharmaceutical drugs rather than other interventions. Other components are computerization of parts of healthcare such as public health, the creation of a "biopolitical economy" of private research outside of state, the perception of health as a moral obligation.
Medicalization has brought health issues to the fore, so people think more and more about things in terms of health and act to promote health. When it comes to health issues, medicine is not the only provider of answers, but there have always been alternatives and competitors. At the same time as medicalization, "paramedicalization" has strengthened: also many treatments for which there is no medical basis, at least for now, are popular and commercially successful. (2025). 9786133088931, VLC Publishing. ISBN 9786133088931
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