Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

The Consumer Turn in Medicalization: Future Directions with Historical FoundationsFuture Directions with Historical Foundations

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness, and Healing

Part of the book series: Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research ((HSSR))

Abstract

The concept of medicalization is one of the most successful and enduring contributions to the field of medical sociology (Bird et al. 2000). Early thinking and empirical studies of medicalization focused primarily upon the notions of deviance and social control by the institution of medicine (Szasz 1974; Zola 1972; Conrad and Schneider 1980). Since then, the concept of medicalization has successfully migrated out of the sociological literature and into the mainstream public press (Nye 2003). For example, medicalization has its own Wikipedia entry, and there are YouTube sites on the medicalization of childbirth, circumcision, and autism. Public use of sociological terms is not new. Medicalization follows the path of other “successful” sociological concepts such as anomie, focus groups, social networks, and gender. Like all things academic, there is a need to continually shape and refine our concepts and techniques to keep them current and relevant. In order for medicalization to remain an important concept in the twenty-first century, sociologists need to continually adapt the concept in relationship to structural and cultural changes in society.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 109.00
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 139.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 179.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Notes

  1. 1.

    See the Wikipedia entry at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicalization and examples of YouTube videos at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4unKTMpBGA, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H9Av4hBNsW8, and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f15JexiQt4U.

  2. 2.

     This theme is echoed elsewhere in the biomedicalization literature when Clarke and Oleson point out that “[s]urveillance medicine and genomics together have already begun to impose new burdens on health care consumers. There are incredible burdens of knowledge expectations—what lay people are expected to know and do about our health, especially in terms of prevention and especially if we have risk factors. As best we can determine, we all are at greater risk for something” (1999, p. 23).

References

  • Abbott A (1988) The system of professions. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

    Google Scholar 

  • Aiken K (2003) Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs: physician survey preliminary results. http://www.fda.gov/cder/ddmac/globalsummit2003/

  • Auerbach J, Figert A (1995) Women’s health research: public policy and sociology. J Health Soc Behav (Special Issue):115–131

    Google Scholar 

  • Barker K (2005) The fibromyalgia story: medical authority and women’s worlds of pain. Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA

    Google Scholar 

  • Bell S (1999) Narratives and lives: women’s health politics and the diagnosis of cancer for DES daughters. Narrative Inq 9(2):347–389

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Bell S (1987) Changing ideas: the medicalization of menopause. Soc Sci Med 24(6):535–542

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berlant J (1975) Profession and monopoly: a study of medicine in the United States and Great Britain. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA

    Google Scholar 

  • Bird C, Conrad P, Fremont A (eds) (2000) Handbook of medical sociology, 5th edn. Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ

    Google Scholar 

  • Boden WE, Diamond G (2008) DTCA for PTCA – Crossing the ine in consumer health education? N Engl J Med 358(21):2197–2200

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Boston Women’s Health Book Collective (1973) Our bodies, ourselves. Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Boston, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Brodie M, Foehr U, Rideout V, Baer N, Miller C, Flournoy R, Altman D (2001) Communicating health information through the entertainment media. Health Aff 20(1):192–199

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Brown ER (1979) Rockefeller medicine men: medicine and capitalism in America. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA

    Google Scholar 

  • Brown P, Zavestoski S, McCormick S, Mayer B, Morello-Frosch R, Altman RG (2004) Embodied health movements: new approaches to social movements in health. Sociol Health Illn 26(1):50–80

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clarke A, Oleson V (1999) Revising, diffracting, acting. In: Clarke A, Oleson V (eds) Revisioning women, health, and healing. Routledge, New York, pp 3–4

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarke A, Shim J (2011) Medicalization and biomedicalization revisited: technoscience and transformations of health and illness. B.A. Pescosolido et al. (eds), Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness, and Healing: A Blueprint for the 21st Century, Spring.

    Google Scholar 

  • Clarke A, Shim J, Mamo L, Fosket JR, Fishman JR (2003) Biomedicalization: technoscientific transformations of health, illness, and U.S. biomedicine. Am Sociol Rev 68(2):161–194

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Clarke A, Shim J, Mamo L, Fosket J, Fishman J (eds) (2010) Biomedicalization: technoscience and transformations of health, illness and U.S. biomedicine. Duke University Press, Durham, NC

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins H, Evans R (2007) Rethinking expertise. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Conrad P (1992) Medicalization and social control. Ann Rev Sociol 18:209–232

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Conrad P (2005) The shifting engines of medicalization. J Health Soc Behav 46:3–14

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Conrad P, Leiter V (2004) Medicalization, markets, and consumer. J Health Soc Behav 45:158–176

    Google Scholar 

  • Conrad P, Schneider J (1980) Deviance and medicalization: from badness to sickness. Mosby, St. Louis, MO

    Google Scholar 

  • Conrad P (2007) The medicalization of society: on the transformation of human conditions into treatable disorders. The Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, MD

    Google Scholar 

  • Crossley N (2006) Contesting psychiatry: social movements in mental health. Routledge, London and New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Davis K (2007) The making of our bodies, ourselves: how feminism travels across borders. Duke University Press, Durham, NC

    Google Scholar 

  • Dingwall R (2008) Essays on professions. Ashgate Publishing, Hampshire

    Google Scholar 

  • Dumit J (2006) Illnesses you have to fight to get: facts as forces in uncertain, emergent illnesses. Soc Sci Med 62(3):577–590

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Duyvendak J, Knijn T, Kremer M (eds) (2006) Policy, people, and the new professional: de-professionalisation and re-professionalisation in care and welfare. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam

    Google Scholar 

  • Epstein S (2008) Patient groups and health movements. In: Hackett E, Lynch M, Amsterdamska O, Wajcman J (eds) The handbook of science and technology studies, 3rd edn. MIT, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Figert A (1996) Women and the ownership of PMS. Aldine de Gruyter, Hawthorne, NY

    Google Scholar 

  • Fischer F (2000) Citizens, experts and the environment: the politics of local knowledge. Duke University Press, Durham, NC

    Google Scholar 

  • Fox N, Ward K, O’Rourke A (2005) The ‘expert patient’: empowerment or medical dominance? The case of weight loss, pharmaceutical drugs and the Internet. Soc Sci Med 60(6):1299–1309

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Fraser N (1989) Unruly practices: power, discourse and gender in contemporary social theory. Polity Press, Cambridge

    Google Scholar 

  • Freidson E (1970) Profession of medicine: a study of the sociology of applied knowledge. Dodd, Mead and Company, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Freidson E (2001) Professionalism: the third logic. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL

    Google Scholar 

  • Henderson S, Peterson A (2002) Consuming health: the commodification of health care. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Horwitz A, Wakefield J (2007) The loss of sadness: how psychiatry has transformed normal sadness into depressive disorder. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Houck J (2006) Hot and bothered: women, medicine, and menopause in modern America. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Illich I (1976) Medical nemesis. Pantheon, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Inhorn M (2006) Defining women’s health: a dozen messages from more than 150 ethnographies. Med Anthropol Q 20(3):345–378

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Kaufmann C (1999) An introduction to the mental health consumer movement. In: Horwitz AV, Scheid TL (eds) A handbook for the study of mental health: social contexts, theories, and systems. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 493–506

    Google Scholar 

  • Kelleher D (1994) Self-help groups and medicine. In: Gabe J, Kelleher D, Williams G (eds) Challenging medicine. Routledge, New York, pp 104–117

    Google Scholar 

  • Kremer M, Tonkens E (2006) Authority, trust, knowledge, and the public good in disarray. In: Duyvendak J, Knijn T, Kremer M (eds) Policy, people, and the new professional: de-professionalisation and re-professionalisation in care and welfare. Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, pp 122–134

    Google Scholar 

  • Lane C (2007) Shyness: how normal behavior became a sickness. Yale University Press, New Haven, CT

    Google Scholar 

  • Larson M (1977) The rise of professionalism. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA

    Google Scholar 

  • Light D (2000) The medical profession and organizational change: from professional dominance to countervailing power. In: Bird C, Conrad P, Fremont A (eds) Handbook of medical sociology. Prentice-Hall, Upper Saddle River, NJ, pp 201–216

    Google Scholar 

  • Litt J (2000) Medicalized motherhood: perspectives from the lives of African-American and Jewish women. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ

    Google Scholar 

  • Loe M (2004) The rise of Viagra. New York University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Lupton D (1997) Consumerism, reflexivity and the medical encounter. Soc Sci Med 45(3):373–381

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mamo L (2005) Biomedicalizing kinship: sperm banks and the creation of affinity-ties. Sci Cult 14(3):237–264

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mamo L (2007) Queering reproduction: achieving pregnancy in the age of technoscience. Duke University Press, Durham, NC

    Google Scholar 

  • Martin E (1987) The woman in the body: a cultural analysis of reproduction. Beacon Press, Boston, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Morello-Frosch R, Zawestoski S, Brown P, Altman RG, McCormick S, Mayer B (2006) Embodied health movements: responses to a ‘scientized’ World. In: Frickel S, Moore K (eds) The new political sociology of science: institutions, networks and power. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, WI

    Google Scholar 

  • Nye R (2003) The evolution of the concept of medicalization in the twentieth century. J Hist Behav Sci 39(2):115–129

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Oxford English Dictionary (2008) Oxford, UK http://dictionary.oed.com

  • Parsons T (1951) The social system. The Free Press, Glencoe, IL

    Google Scholar 

  • Pescosolido B (2006) Professional dominance and the limits of erosion. Society 43(6):21–29

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Pescosolido B, Martin J (2004) Cultural authority and the sovereignty of american medicine: the role of networks, class and community. J Health Polit Policy Law 29(4–5):735–755

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Peterson MJ (1978) The medical profession in mid-Victorian London. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA

    Google Scholar 

  • Popay J, Williams G, Thomas C, Gatrell A (1998) “Theorising inequalities in health: the place of lay knowledge. Sociol Health Illn 20(5):619–644

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Porter R (1985) The patient’s view: doing medical history from below. Theory Soc 14:175–198

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Prior L (2003) Belief, knowledge and expertise: the emergence of the lay expert in medical sociology. Sociol Health Illn 25(3):41–57

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Quadagno J (2005) One nation uninsured: why the U.S. has no national health insurance. Oxford University Press, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Riessman CK (1983) Women and medicalization: a new perspective. Soc Policy (Summer):3–18

    Google Scholar 

  • Riska, Elianne (2003) “Gendering the Medicalization Thesis.” Advances in Gender Research: Gender Perspectives on Health and Medicine, edited by M. Segal and V. Demos. London: Elsevier 7:59–87

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruzek S (1978) The women’s health movement. Praeger, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Scott W (1990) PTSD in the DSM-III: a case in the politics of diagnosis and disease. Soc Probl 37(3):294–310

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Shim J (2005) Constructing ‘race’ across the science-lay divide: racial formation in the epidemiology and experience of cardiovascular disease. Soc Stud Sci 35(3):405–436

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Scott S, Prior L, Wood F, Gray J (2005) Repositioning the patient: the implications of being ‘at risk’. Soc Sci Med 60:1869–1879

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Szasz T ([1961]1974) The myth of mental illness: foundations of a theory of personal conduct, Revisedth edn. HarperCollins, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Tomes N (2001) Merchants of health: medicine and consumer culture in the United States, 1900–1940.J Am Hist <http://www.historycooperative.org/cgibin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/jah/88.2/tomes.html> (16 Oct. 2008)

  • Waitzkin H (1993) The politics of medical encounters: how patients and doctors deal with social problems. Yale University Press, New Haven

    Google Scholar 

  • Winnick T, Werum R, Pavalko E (2001) Managing mental illness: trends in continuing mental health education for family doctors, 1977–1996. In: Kronenfeld JJ (ed) Research in the sociology of health care. JAI, Greenwich, CT, pp 179–203

    Google Scholar 

  • Woloshin S, Schwartz L (2006) Giving legs to restless legs: a case study of how the media helps make people sick. PLoS Med 3(4):e170. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.0030170

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zavestoski S, Brown P, McCormick S, Mayer B, D’Ottavi M, Lucove JC (2004) Patient activism and the struggle for diagnosis: Gulf War illnesses and other medically unexplained physical symptoms in the U.S. Soc Sci Med 58(1):161–175

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Zola I (1972) Medicine as an institution of social control. Sociol Rev 20:497–504

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, Loyola University Chicago, Coffey Hall 421, 1032 W. Sheridan Road, Chicago, IL, 60660, USA

    Anne E. Figert

Authors
  1. Anne E. Figert
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anne E. Figert .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Social Research, Indiana University, E. Third Street 1022, Bloomington, 47405, Indiana, USA

    Bernice A. Pescosolido

  2. Institute of Social Research, Indiana University, E. Third Street 1022, Bloomington, 47405, Indiana, USA

    Jack K. Martin

  3. Institute of Social Research, Indiana University, E. Third Street 1022, Bloomington, 47405, Indiana, USA

    Jane D. McLeod

  4. , National Primary Care Research and Devel, The University of Manchester, Oxford Street, Manchester, M13 9PL, United Kingdom

    Anne Rogers

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC

About this chapter

Cite this chapter

Figert, A.E. (2011). The Consumer Turn in Medicalization: Future Directions with Historical FoundationsFuture Directions with Historical Foundations. In: Pescosolido, B., Martin, J., McLeod, J., Rogers, A. (eds) Handbook of the Sociology of Health, Illness, and Healing. Handbooks of Sociology and Social Research. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7261-3_15

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation