Abstract
Medicalization designates a multidimensional social process whereby a growing array of conditions and experiences of human life become defined, understood, and managed through medical and medically related expertise. Over the last 50 years, the multidisciplinary study of medicalization has been distinctly infused with moral concerns gravitating around issues of aspirations, freedom, power, and domination in society. In light of the accumulated scholarship, the medicalization of life and society is considered a development characteristic of modernity and late modernity with ample and disputed implications. Processes of medicalization are seen as constitutive of far-reaching transformations in contemporary societies, including globalization; the emergence of new forms of political and economic power; and the redefinition of social, cultural, and moral practices.
Moral questions surrounding medicalization relate to a wide array of bioethical elaborations on topics like reproductive health, end of life care, genetics, or the conduct of medical research, to take only a few examples. However, bioethical analyses of medicalization qua medicalization, as comprehensive social phenomenon are yet to be fully developed. In this respect, social justice and human rights perspectives may be particularly suited to contribute normative frameworks for the ethical examination of medicalization. Such contributions would enrich the critical debate of moral aspects of medicalization and would further an ethically grounded local and global health governance.
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Further Readings
Biehl, J., & Petryna, A. (2013). When people come first. Critical studies in global health. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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Bodea, A. (2016). Medicalization. In: ten Have, H. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Bioethics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_283
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09483-0_283
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