Susan E. Bell (editor) - Reimagining (Bio)Medicalization, Pharmaceuticals and Genetics: Old Critiques and New Engagements

In recent years medicalization, the process of making something medical, has gained considerable ground and a position in everyday discourse. In this multidisciplinary collection of original essays, the authors expertly consider how issues around medicalization have developed, ways in which it is changing and the potential shapes it will take in the future. They develop a unique argument that medicalization, biomedicalization, pharmaceuticalization and geneticization are related and coevolving processes, present throughout the globe. This is an ideal addition to anthropology, sociology and STS courses about medicine and health.

Susan E. Bell is A. Myrick Freeman Professor of Social Sciences/Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Bowdoin College. She is the author of DES Daughters: Embodied Knowledge and the Transformation of Womens Health Politics (Temple, 2009) and the guest editor with Alan Radley of a special issue of health, Another Way of Knowing: Art, Disease, and Illness Experience (2011).

Anne E. Figert is Associate Professor of Sociology at Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Women and the Ownership of PMS: The Structuring of a Psychiatric Disorder (Aldine de Gruyter, 1996) and the co-editor of two volumes: Building Community: Social Science in Action (Pine Forge Press, 1997) and Current Research on Occupations and Professions, volume 9 (JAI Press, 1996).

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Old Critiques and New Engagements

Edited by Susan E. Bell & Anne E. Figert

First published 2015

by Routledge

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and by Routledge

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2015 Taylor & Francis

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Reimagining (bio)medicalization, pharmaceuticals and genetics : old critiques and new engagements / edited by Susan E. Bell & Anne E. Figert.

p. ; cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

I. Bell, Susan E., editor. II. Figert, Anne E., editor.

[DNLM: 1. Medicalization. 2. Drug Industrytrends. 3. Drug Therapytrends. 4. Genetic Phenomena. WA 31]

RS380

338.476153dc23

2014033649

ISBN: 978-1-138-79370-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-138-79371-2 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-76092-6 (ebk)

Typeset in Minion Pro

by Keystroke, Station Road, Codsall, Wolverhampton

PETER CONRAD

SUSAN E. BELL AND ANNE E. FIGERT

Part I
Reimaginings: (Bio)Medicalization and Technoscience in the Twenty-First Century

SUSAN E. BELL AND ANNE E. FIGERT

ELLEN ANNANDALE AND ANNE HAMMARSTRM

JANET K. SHIM, KATHERINE WEATHERFORD DARLING, SARA L. ACKERMAN, SANDRA SOO-JIN LEE AND ROBERT A. HIATT

REBECCA M. HERZIG

JEREMY A. GREENE

ARI SAMSKY

COURTNEY A. CUTHBERTSON

MATTHEW E. ARCHIBALD

Part III
Genetics/Genomics

CATHERINE BLISS

RUHA BENJAMIN

SARA SHOSTAK AND MARGOT MOINESTER

DAVID K. HECHT

SUSAN M. REVERBY

Foreword

Nearly forty years ago when I was in the midst of writing my PhD dissertation, Identifying Hyperactive Children, as a deviance-labeling study, a colleague of mine suggested I read an article by Irving Kenneth Zola on Medicine as an Institution of Social Control. This article introduced me to the term medicalization, creating a huge intellectual a-ha; yes, thats what Im studying, the medicalization of deviant behavior. This article, published in a modest British sociological journal, changed the analytic focus of my dissertation, reshaped the trajectory of my career, and in significant ways helped to broaden the horizons of medical sociology. This volume, so many decades later, reflects on how issues around medicalization have developed over the years and, perhaps more importantly, examines ways in which it is changing in the present and likely in the future.

As explicated in this volume there are numerous ways medicalization and related concepts are formulated. As a point of departure, in its most basic common-sense form it means to make medical. A more formal definition sees medicalization as the process by which previously nonmedical problems become defined and treated as medical problems, usually as diseases or disorders. The emphasis in this perspective is on process and definition. Without going into great detail here, I want to present what I see as five major characteristics of medicalization. (1) The definitional issue is key to medicalization, i.e., how a problem is defined is key to what is done about it. (2) There are degrees of medicalization; some problems are fully medicalized, some partly medicalized and others barely medicalized. There can be contestation and disagreement about a problems medicalized status. (3) Medicalized categories are elastic and can expand or contract. (4) Physician or other medical personnel involvement in medicalization is variable; sometimes medical professionals are essential to medicalization, sometimes they are marginal or even nonexistent. (5) Medicalization is bidirectional, i.e., there can be demedicalization as well as medicalization. In my view, medicalization research does not adjudicate whether or not an entity is really a medical problem, but rather how it became to be depicted (and accepted) as a medical problem and with what consequences. While some authors in this volume may contest some of these characteristics, all would probably agree that over the past four decades there has been much more medicalization than demedicalization and this also makes this volume significant and timely.

Some critics often conflate medicalization with overmedicalization and use the term almost as an epithet. They work from the assumption that medicalization is a bad thing. But it is easy to come up with examples where medicalization has had positive effects, e.g., epilepsy as a disease not a curse and, most recently, treatments for chronic pain. The authors in this volume avoid this trap, by examining the processes and consequences of medicalization (and its related concepts). Analysts like the ones contributing to this volume consider issues like genetics or race as social scientists would examine any social phenomena. What makes the big difference here are the various conceptual tools they use to render their scholarly examination.