What Is Medicalization, How Has It Affected Humanity Over The Years?

The inclusion of situations that are not seen as a disease in daily life in the field of medicine and starting to be defined as a disease is called medicalization. In fact, we can see that many issues such as birth, death, nutrition, old age, weight, menopause, baldness, which are naturally met in traditional societies in social life, turn into a medical problem later on.

We can say that the reason for medicalization is “overdiagnosis” because for something to be a disease it must first be defined. for example grief, sadness, shyness, failure, inability to focus conditions such as ADHD (attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder) and depression have now turned into pathologies due to medicalization. Medicalization first began to emerge in Illich’s perspective in the 1960s. In this respect, we can say that they go hand in hand with capitalism. In fact, medicalization plays into the hands of capitalism because the medicalization of everything can lead people to consume more of the healthcare industry.

In short, all these can harm individuals’ ability to cope with problems, according to sociologist Ivan Illich. Well, Illich, humane medicine coping skills What does he actually mean by saying it hurts?

Medicalization can make people dependent on the medical field about their own health.

Medicalization, the relationship between patient and doctor unbalanced can make one. For example, individuals can easily waive their right to have a say on their own health. In this case, people can become overly dependent on medicine’s judgment on their own health. At this point, Illich says that the definition of many conditions that are considered ordinary in life as diseases makes people addicted to medicine. According to Illich, this addiction daily life skills it makes you forget. We can make this dependency understandable with examples as follows; Menopause is a natural phenomenon unique to women, but after medicine defined menopause as a problem and included it in its field, women began to resort to medicine for menopause, use medical drugs, and manage the menopause process under the supervision of medicine.

Another sociologist Szasz mentions that medicalization first appeared in the field of psychiatry in the 1970s. As we said at the beginning, moods and behaviors that were considered normal before were abnormalized with the diagnosis of psychiatry and started to be named with names such as depression and hyperactivity. Thus, individuals suffering from this condition had to use psychiatric drugs and go to doctor’s checks on certain days every week, as their existence entered the field of medicine, perhaps because they had a sad, sad and melancholic temperament. The inclusion of everything in so many fields of medicine can damage the natural coping abilities of individuals and cause them to always be in need of someone else’s care.

According to Illich; Medicine reduces people’s strategies for suffering by interfering with social life.

Medicine

Illich talks about the fact that survival is an art for cultures that have not undergone medicalization. So what do you mean by this situation, actually? of suffering we can say that it emphasizes that these cultures have not disappeared yet.

For example, Illich makes the first example of the medicalization of health on the medicalization of birth. until the 19th century when birth is normalIn the 19th century and beyond, childbirth was no longer a normal process. Previously, women started to go to gynecological examinations while helping each other during the birth process. In fact, all women used to give birth normally, but nowadays it can be seen that they resort to cesarean section to make the birth more painless and easier. This is where the critique of medicalization comes into play, because with a method like cesarean section, a normal process for women becomes medical. In other words, as we can see through this example, Illich mentions that patients become completely dependent on medicine and, over time, move away from many of the features that were once considered normal.

Resources: 1, 2, 3, 4


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