91 FOUR Medicalisation Medicalisation is a key technology of power through which drug users are governed. It is the process by which non-medical problems come to be defined and treated as if they are medical issues. Another key strand of drug policy discourse in the UK, US and Canada operating alongside prohibition and punishment is that of public health. The technology of medicalisation underpins public health discourse, and compliments prohibition and punishment regimes. Medicalisation operates as a form of social control and regulation whereby social
seems to be oscillation between medicalisation and demedicalisation of many aspects of everyday life’, and that this constant patient-led renegotiating of what should and should not be medicalized is a facet of our post-modern society ( 2005 : 238). Medicalization only becomes problematic when it causes stigma and discrimination and puts up barriers to what becomes labeled as ‘treatment’. With trans people, there is a clear parallel to be drawn between the medicalization of gender variance and the history of the medicalization of sexuality variance. The American
studied how competition ( Bourdieu, 1975 ) and boundary work ( Gieryn, 1983 ) shape the construction of knowledge in a scientific field. In this article, we are not interested in the constructed truths about poverty but rather in who is engaged in constructing these truths over time. Therefore, we investigated whether there has been a change in the prominence of different disciplines in the scientific discourse on poverty since the start of the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) in 1956. Based on medicalisation and psychologisation theory ( Conrad, 1992 ; Conrad
training (AMA, 1992; Schoonmaker and Shull, 1994) 17 which is intended to ensure the adequate provision of services for women experiencing domestic violence. As with policy development, screening for domestic violence has inherent within it a range of contradictions which fit uneasily within medical discourse. These contradictions relate to the concept of ‘health absolutism’ (found within holistic/person-led models of healthcare) (Gallagher and Ferrante, 1987) and its impact on the medicalisation of social problems and the professionalisation of medicine itself (Davis
, the NHS took the emphasis of the lead agency role for social services as another opportunity to withdraw from continuing healthcare provision (Glendinning et al, 2005, p 247). Green Paper on Social Care An initial reading of Independence, well-being and choice (DH, 2005a) is likely to have the opposite effect to generating concerns around a re-medicalisation of later life. Rather, the Green Paper is concerned to set out a framework of desired outcomes that is the very opposite to defining older people solely in terms of their medical needs. More specifically, seven
Introduction Accounts of legal embodiment are impoverished if they do not explore the ways in which other institutions contribute to our understanding of bodies. In the case of intersex embodiment, medicine is crucial for understanding how intersex people have been framed – indeed, and as we shall outline, medical accounts offer the paradigmatic account of intersex embodiment. Medicine investigates and explores the materiality of the body and presents its results as objective and value free. However, medicine’s reporting back of this materiality is not
turns me off. It’s this concern with medicine that seems to override everything else - the natural process. (Alison Mountjoy) Defending childbirth as a natural process is not easy. Being critical of its medicalisation, of the control doctors believe they should properly exercise over it, places the patient in an attitude of confrontation: battles produce stress and anxiety. It is easier for the patient to act passively. As Alison Mountjoy puts it: Who do you believe? That’s part of the trouble of having a baby, that somehow each book and each medical person, they
difficulties. LGBT and non-binary frameworks are ill-equipped to challenge the paradigmatic construction of intersex embodiment as a disorder and cannot redress the systemic disadvantages that arise from the medical management of intersex bodies. Nor can anti-discrimination laws remedy the scope of rights violations identified by international bodies like the UNCRC and the Council of Europe that these non-consensual medical interventions may result in ( Garland and Slokenberga, 2018 : 1; Office for the Commissioner of Human Rights, 2019 ; UNCRC, 2019 ). At best, then
Introduction The purpose of this chapter is to consider the gendered implications of product liability claims for injuries caused by dangerous medical devices. In recent years, alarmingly large numbers of women have been injured in a series of scandals involving medical devices, including (but by no means limited to) Poly Implant Prothèse (PIP) breast implants, the Essure permanent contraceptive device and transvaginal mesh. 1 In addition, there is growing evidence that devices that are implanted into both male and female bodies, such as joint replacements
79 FOUR Medical care and health policy During the late 1960s Doris Jacobs was screened for sickle-cell anemia, one of several sickle-cell diseases (SCD) that primarily affect African Americans, and diagnosed with having the sickle-cell trait. The 1970s was an era when advances in medical screening technologies and political activism among African Americans merged to define sickle-cell anemia as a major epidemic among African Americans, and one that had been neglected by the health care system arguably because it was a “black disease.” Indeed, sickle
