Health and Medical Sociology

Biography

Biography: Zofia A Slonska

Abstract

Analysis of the process of medicalization in the developed societies of the Euro-American cultural circle confirms its historical variability associated with the modernization of societies and their health systems. For centuries, passing the consecutive phases of modernization, the societies evolved the features that in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries enabled the clinical medicine to achieve a wide sphere of control, covering not only medical but also social areas. The phenomenon of the acquisition of medicine control over social life was named by the medical sociologists ‘medicalization’. In short, way we can identify ‘medicalization ‘with entering by medicine in a social life and treating the social problems as they would be the medical problems. The aim of the presentation is to analyze the process of medicalization of societies and types of societal response [passive/active] to it in the modern or postmodern context. Moreover the proposal of types of medicalization e.g. medicalization through systemic domination, technological medicalization, or commercial medicalization and their possible consequences for public health will be discussed.