“Sex survey ruined our wedding,” screamed the front page of the Sun. The newspaper reported how a “couple had a furious row and called off their wedding after the bride-to-be revealed their sex secrets in a university survey.” This could be a routine example of how the press uses research on sex to sell papers. This case is more interesting, however, because the groom to be was clearly unhappy ...

Jocalyn Clark argues that the medicalisation of global health, like other aspects of human life and health, produces a narrow view of global health problems and will limit the success of solutions proposed to replace the millennium development goals.

Van Dijk and colleagues present three cases to illustrate and discuss the relationship between medicalisation and overdiagnosis. In this commentary, I consider each of the case studies in turn, and in doing so emphasise two main points. The first is that it is not possible to assess whether overdiagnosis is occurring based solely on incidence rates: it is necessary also to have data about the b...

OBJECTIVE in this paper we offer new insights about the medicalisation of childbirth by closely examining the trends in obstetric intervention rates in Flanders and the Netherlands and by considering the influence of contextual factors - including the organisation of the medical system, professional guidelines, and cultural ideas - on the way maternity care is delivered. DESIGN a comparative ...

Although assisted dying has been most commonly presented within a medicalised framework, the notion of de-medicalisation is employed in this paper to suggest that there are emerging models of assisted dying in which some medical aspects assumed to be an integral part of the phenomenon are both challenged and diminished. The paper considers cases where relatives have facilitated a loved one's as...

Introduction This article explores the growth and impact of the medicalisation of HIV and HIV-related stigma. Since the early days of the virus when treatments were unavailable, political voices for HIV advocacy were powerful; public discourse reflected these changes with growing public-health campaigns that began to demystify HIV as a concept. However, with the development of antiretroviral th...

In this article, tragedy and utopia are juxtaposed, and it is proposed that the problem of "medicalisation" is better understood in a framework of tragedy than in a utopian one. In utopia, it is presupposed that there is an error behind every setback and every side effect, whereas tragedy brings to light how side effects can be the result of irreconcilable conflicts. Medicalisation is to some e...