Читать книгу The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Medical Sociology - Группа авторов - Страница 33

Medicalization is a major theoretical concept in medical sociology. According to Peter Conrad (2007; 2013), medicalization in its simplest form means “to make medical.” It refers to the process by which previously nonmedical conditions become defined and treated as a medical problem, that is, as either a disease or disorder of some type. Conrad provides several examples of conditions which medicine assumed control over by defining them as a medical problem to be treated by medical means, even though in the past they were not necessarily considered as such. These include attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), normal sadness, grief, shyness, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), sleep disorders, aging, obesity, infertility, learning disabilities, erectile dysfunction, surgical cosmetic enhancements, and baldness among others. The approach of the medicalization concept, however, is not to contest diagnoses but examine how a problem becomes defined as medical and the social consequences of doing so.

Conrad finds the sources or “drivers” of medicalization are now changing. Physicians are slowly being sidelined by new engines of medicalization making things medical, namely (1) biotechnology, especially the pharmaceutical industry and genetics, (2) consumers desiring treatments, and (3) managed care when health insurance companies make decisions about what is or is not included in their coverage. The changes connected to the increasing significance of biotechnology have led to the introduction of biomedicalization theory (Clarke et al. 2010). Biomedicalization consists of the rise of computer information and other new technologies to increase medical surveillance and treatment interventions by the use of genetics, bioengineering, chemoprevention, individualized designer drugs, multiple sources of information, patient data banks, digitized patient records, and other innovations. Also important in this process is the Internet making it easier to get medical information and merchandise, be exposed to advertising, and enhance the role of pharmaceutical companies in marketing their products.