The concept of overdiagnosis is a dominant topic in medical literature and discussions. In research that targets overdiagnosis, medicalisation is often presented as the societal and individual burden of unnecessary medical expansion. In this way, the focus lies on the influence of medicine on society, neglecting the possible influence of society on medicine. In this perspective, we aim to provi...

Medicalisation is a social phenomenon in which conditions that were once under legal, religious, personal or other jurisdictions are brought into the domain of medical authority. Low sexual desire females has been medicalised, pathologised as disease, and intervened upon with range pharmaceuticals. There two polarised positions on medicalisation low female desire: I call these mainstream view c...

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 possibil...

We examine the contemporary debate on attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, in which concerns about medicalisation and overuse of drug treatments are paramount. We show medicalisation in attention deficit hyperactivity disorder to be a complex issue that requires systematic research to be properly understood. In particular, we suggest that the debate on this disorder might be more productiv...