In the name of health and illness: On some socio-political consequences of medical influence

This paper tries to delineate the perils of this wholesale transfer of the medical model to workaday world.

Abstract

Medicine and health care are becoming major areas of socio control, nudging aside, if not incorporating, themore traditional institutions of religion and law. This is not occuring through the political power physicians hold or can influence, but is largely an insidious and often undramatic phenomenon accomplished by "medicalizing" much of daily living, by making medicine and the labels "health" and "ill" relevant to a ever increasing part of human existence. This paper tries to delineate the perils of this wholesale transfer of the medical model to workaday world.