POLLUTION AND HEALTH

Our Medicalized Society

Do you need medicine whenever you have disagreements? Do you seek Medicare whenever you are broke? I have some perspectives on this blog. Read and learn what might be happening.

A fundamental idea in sociology, medicalization refers to the process by which a growing number of social and personal phenomena are explained and comprehended in terms of medicine. Constructionist approaches to social problems have used medicalization to study the ways that medical language has been used to describe a growing range of social problems. These methods are particularly concerned with the ways that social problems are defined and described. Consumerism, the interests of pharmaceutical and biotech businesses, and the growth of knowledge have all been recognized as drivers of the proliferation of medical definitions. Secularization, the increasing influence of science and medicine, the waning of tradition, and the political shift from production to consumption are examples of contextual variables.

Over the last 20 years, there has been a significant shift in how humans view and handle behavioral and psychological issues. Specifically, there has been a marked increase in the medicalization of social life during the 1990s and the first ten years of the twenty-first century. When a condition is medicalized, it indicates that it is classified as a medical issue and is handled with medical methods. Problems that were once thought to be spiritual, moral, or behavioral in nature and resolved by prayer, therapy, or punishment, or just put up with, are today classified as diseases and treated by doctors using biological therapies. Since pharmaceutical corporations were allowed to directly market their goods to customers in 1997, in particular, medicalization has been almost exclusively linked to the use of chemicals that modify allegedly flawed biological aspects of human existence.

Medicalization of puberty

When a girl reaches puberty at an unexpectedly young age, what steps should she take? Taking into account how family members and other people in the child's social circle can re-relate to her in ways that support and accommodate her early growth is one way to tackle this challenge. In contrast, a different strategy has been used in the medical area, where the child is responsible for making the necessary changes to guarantee that she enters a normal puberty period. This alteration is accomplished by halting the child's pubertal growth using a potent pharmaceutical intervention.

Medicalization of reproductive events

Medical technology has had a significant impact on childbirth over the past few centuries, and in most Western nations today, medical intervention is standard practice. Here, Richard Johanson and colleagues contend that the concept of normal delivery may have become overly "medicalized" and that attitudes about childbirth, the use of evidence-based practice, and collaborative efforts are actually linked to higher rates of normal birth.

Prior to the 20th century, hospital births were rare, with the exception of a few large cities, and births occurring exclusively in the home until the 17th century across the majority of the world.1-2 Men were exclusively involved in difficult deliveries prior to the introduction of forceps, and they used dangerous equipment, which meant that babies were almost never born alive and that the mother died as well.

Even among obstetricians, the idea of a medically supervised pregnancy did not emerge until much later in the 20th century. There was little information in medical texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries about supervising "normal" pregnancies. Accordingly, there was no medical prenatal care available at the beginning of the twentieth century. By 1900, 50% of US women gave delivery with a doctor present, but only those who were experiencing serious problems.

Since the 1970s, social scientists have conducted a thorough analysis of medicalization, primarily concentrating on two aspects of the phenomenon: the extension of medical authority to a wider range of human experience and its utilization as a tool for social control via the use of the medical (clinical) gaze and surveillance. Actually, the medical field was evolving into an establishment of social control, or as one scholar put it, "the new repository of truth, the place where absolute and often final judgments are made by supposedly morally neutral and objective experts and that these judgements are made in the name of health." Studies have pointed out that the medical community establishes the criteria for determining whether ailments qualify as illnesses.

Some experts define medicalization as the process by which problems that are not medical in nature are characterized and handled as such. According to this method, definitions of illness are seen as the results of social interactions or agreements, which are fundamentally unfair because laypeople are almost always less qualified than healthcare specialists to define what really is unwell. This indicates that there is a great deal of room for social regulation because medical experts are able to observe, act, and make decisions.

But as research on medicalization grew, it became evident that complex societal forces, as opposed to just the medical profession, govern medicalization, which extends well beyond medical imperialism. By the 1990s, these societal forces—dubbed "engines" of medicalization by experts had transformed. Before the 1990s, the medical profession, as well as several social movements and interest groups, were the main social forces driving medicalization. However, it appears that changes in medical knowledge and practice in western societies have since encouraged biotechnology, consumers, and managed care.

Medical conceptions of women as less capable and more diseased stem from this ability to procreate. In fact, a number of facets of women's lives that are related to their ability to procreate have been medicalized, including menstruation, premenstrual syndrome, infertility, pregnancy, childbirth, and menopause. Pregnancy and labor appear to be the most contentious of them.

Not only are pregnancy and childbirth significant life events for women, but they also have wider cultural and societal ramifications. One could say that pregnancy and childbirth are reflections of cultural values and progress, indicating how powerful and insightful these experiences are.

The way a society views pregnancy and childbirth indicates a lot about that civilization. The last century has seen a major change in delivery techniques, and the conception of childbirth in both industrialized and developing nations has changed as a result. Following World War II, hospital births became the norm in European and other countries. Before the 20th century, conception and childbirth were viewed as natural processes governed by forces of nature on a global scale.

This was particularly true in rural areas, where there was also a high rate of illness among mothers and newborns. There has been a decrease in maternal and perinatal morbidity despite advancements in obstetrics and better care; yet, discourses have emerged that highlight the blurred line between normal and pathological. Political decision-making determines what is deemed abnormal or deviant in a community, and these labels of deviance have progressively moved from the moral to the medical domain. These days, surveillance medicine—which keeps an eye on a variety of risks—drives pregnancy and deliveries.

Women's experiences with these dangers are shaped by their encounters with the medical facility, particularly in light of the fact that childbirth and pregnancy are now recognized as medical conditions and treated as such, rather than as personal events.

Midwives, as the birthing authorities in this process, have gradually lost their authority as a result of coming under medical jurisdiction. As a result, they are no longer able to operate autonomously throughout the birthing process or to follow women during pregnancy.

The prevailing biomedical ideology still heavily influences pregnancy and childbirth, despite growing debate about what constitutes medical expertise and the degree to which medicalization and medical social control are related.

The loss of women's autonomy and their readiness for medical monitoring are linked to the medicalization of pregnancy and childbirth, indicating the latter's active participation in the process. But there are distinct distinctions in how obstetrics and midwifery conceptualize medicalization. In contrast to obstetrics, which views pregnancy and childbirth as medical processes, midwifery practice is based on a different philosophy and is governed by regulatory constraints, meaning that relatively few treatments and monitoring are carried out. Women-centered worldview, as further explained by some experts, emphasizes the normalcy of childbirth while maintaining that one should evaluate each woman as an individual rather than relying solely on statistically determined dangers.

This raises some concerns regarding how both professional groups understand the term "medicalization" and how it affects clinical practice.

Further reading

1. Benyamini Y, Molcho ML, Dan U, Gozlan M, Preis H. Women’s attitudes towards the medicalization of childbirth and their associations with planned and actual modes of birth. Women Birth. 2017;30(5):424–30. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wombi.2017.03.007 Epub 2017 Apr 20 PMID: 28434672.

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