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Prompt Question:

Medicalization refers to the definition of an aspect of social experience as a disease or in need of medical monitoring. Drawing on examples from class, discuss the ways in which medicalization can be either beneficial or harmful. Why does medicalization carry such power?

Medicalization refers to defining a part of social reality as belonging to medical systems. It defines human behaviors, status, and experiences as medical issues. However, medicalization is not the single best thing; While medicalization formulates standards to cure people, it also creates and reinforces social norms and inequalities through the narrow curative approach. Medicalization has high authority to operate, but such power is not always fair or uniform.

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Medicalization can be beneficial. It provides standards and makes available for medical interventions. Once identified, the medical issue can be able to intervene upon because of medicalization. About 80% of people in the US die in medical institutions, and most US people give birth in hospitals (Gawande, 2006). According to Gawande (2006), obstetrics has become more standardized and industrialized over time with the aim of medicine. Medicalization allows more trained practitioners to provide more reliable treatment for more people. Besides, medicalization also allows higher bioavailability during organ transplantation, which further provides medical interventions to people “medically in-need.”

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However, medicalization set up standards that are shaped by social norms. For example, medicalization defines what “health” or “death is.” In medicalization, “health” is defined as a fixed standard that carries social norms and value judgment (Metzl, 2010). People may be considered unhealthy because they are overweight, but there is nothing wrong with their body parts. The definition of “Death” is also shaped by social norms: most Western countries accept the idea of “brain death” while countries with traditional thoughts consider “brain death” as alive through the use of the mechanical ventilator (Hamdy, 2012). These definitions in the medicalization are shaped by social norms, and they reinforce those social norms by practicing medicalized definitions.

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Medicalization also decides who has a “symptom.” In medicalization, social power is embedded in the standard to diagnose someone as “ill.” For example, homosexuality was classified as a disease in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders - First Version (1952). Since the social norm accepts that gender is not restricted to male-female sex, reversions of DSM no longer consider homosexuality as a disease. That said, medicalization is not curing people because they are “ill,” but because the social norms consider them as “ill.”

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While medicalization creates standards based on social norms, it treats particular diseases regardless of individual differences. For example, mental disorders in the DSM are diagnosed through categorical symptoms, even if these disorders are not categorical. The patient presents the lived, experienced body for treatment while the doctor treats the object, mindless body (Leder, 1984). In medicalization, individual differences are not important when treating diseases; instead, patients are treated to become expected by the social norms.

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Pharmaceutical Industries have become more and more popular in medicalization. If pharmaceutical industries change the threshold for people to take medicine to control certain diseases, the number of risky or diagnosed people will change accordingly. That assigns pharmaceutical industries such a great power to change the standard of risky people. Pharmaceutical industries that desire maximum profit may keep lowering the threshold to increase the number of people use medicines. That said, medicalization further allows other industries to create standards of diseases.

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Besides, medical interventions are not free. This further leads to social inequalities that people with inferior social or economic status can hardly enjoy proper interventions, while people with superior social or economic status can be easy to access superior medical services.

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That said, though medicalization makes it easier to cure people and provide medical interventions, medicalization creates standards following the social norms and further reinforces social norms and inequality. But why medicalization carries such power?

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People are about to live in the world, so the power of deciding on life is always strong. In the past, Sovereign Power has been the strongest power in traditional countries, where the king or the queen can decide whom to die (Lynch, 2011). However, with the development of scientific theories and new terminologies, technologies have become a type of surveillance, and the disciplinary power has been distributed through different institutions that manage life, such as prisons (Lynch, 2011). Medicalization assigns the new biopower that is over the bodies and populations, supported by modern medical theories and technologies. Medicalization creates the system for people to live - through defining “health” standards and provide interventions, and let people die - through organized management of withdrawal services. Medicalization creates the power to manage life and death in modern life.

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Reference List (Ordered by Appearance, Citation Format not used due to technical issues)

Gawande, Atul. 2006. “The Score: How Childbirth Went Industrial.” New Yorker, October.

Metzl, Jonathan. 2010. “Why Against Health?” In Jonathan Metzl (ed.) Against Health: How Health Became the New Morality. New York: New York University Press. (excerpt)

Hamdy, Sherine. 2012. Our Eyes Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt. Berkeley: University of California Press.

(1952). Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (1st?ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association.

Leder, Drew. 1984. “Medicine and paradigms of embodiment.” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 9: 29–43.

Lynch, R. A. (2011) Foucault's theory of power. In Taylor, D. (red.)?Michel Foucault: Key Concepts?(pp. 13-26). Acumen Publishing Ltd.