Abstract
This chapter describes what happens when the existential concept of health is objectified. The term for this is medicalization. In short, medicalization reverses the medicine and well-being relationship: Instead of understanding that medicine is in service to well-being, well-being is now in service to medicine. As such, preventative medicine asks individuals without any impairment to make changes that affect their well-being. One’s routines are inhibited for the sake of not having their routines inhibited. Instead of seeing health as the absence of medical treatment, it has become synonymous with medical treatment. This includes pharmaceutical regimens as well as so-called healthy lifestyle choices. A dissident of modern medicine, Ivan Illich, is used to describe the gravity of these consequences.
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Notes
- 1.
It is necessary to add the disclaimer “reported” because cardiac disease is often listed when the cause of death of a person under medical care is uncertain. It is much easier to report that a patient has died due to cardiac complications when they had actually died during surgery, even if that surgery was on their kidneys or liver.
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Whitehead, P.M. (2019). Medicalization. In: Existential Health Psychology. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21355-8_5
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