This chapter discusses elaborately the current discourse on medicalisation in society. The debate on medicalisation of human health by medical sociologists has been discussed to understand the different issues regarding use of medical technology and human health. The medicalisation of human body in general has received lot of attention both theoretically and empirically in the last few decades....

References 1 Illich I. Medical nemesis. New York: Pantheon, 1975: 4, 35. 2 Mead N, Bower P. Patient-centeredness: a conceptual framework and review of the empirical literature. Soc Sci Med 2000; 51: 1087–110. 3 Tomes N. Patients or health care consumers? Why the history of contested terms matters. In Stevens R, Rosenberg C, Burns, LR, eds. History and health policy. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers U...

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...

What is medicalisation? What are its causes and eff ects? Who benefi ts from medicalisation, and who is harmed? What, if anything, should be done about it? Answers to these questions would have seemed quite obvious in the 1970s, when the term entered academic and medical publications: medicalisation, the expansion of medical authority into the domains of everyday existence, was promoted by doct...

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...

1 critiques of medicalisation may have become less fashionable, but no less necessary. The continuing need for a critical perspective on medicalisation is apparent at a time when the UK media displays a violent backlash against people with drink and drug problems; when the British Prime Minister defines the optimal method to 'get drug addicts clean'; 2 and when the Chair of the RCGP endorses an...

This article reports on a study with staff working in assisted conception clinics in the UK about making welfare of the child (WOC) assessments pre-conception. This aspect of infertility treatment is obligatory under section 13(5) of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act, which was amended in 2008. The aim of the study was to find out how this change to the law had impacted on practice. In...

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...