Medicalization as a Critique of Modernity

Abstract

Representatives of the medicalization thesis in sociology propose that in modernity the human condition is increasingly translated into quantified and medical terms. Problems are increasingly reduced to issues of individual and public health. On the one hand, this results in an increase of government intervention in the lives of citizens, concentrating power in the hands of experts, while politics legitimates itself via medical expertise. On the other hand, subjects themselves demand medicalization as a form of recognition. Medicalization as a sociological paradigm problematizes the modern drive to construct issues in medical terms. However there are no easy answers, as alternative medicine too is a form of medicalization. More reflexivity is warranted when it comes to problematization and categorization of phenomena associated with the human condition.