ArticleTheoretical medicine and bioethics2017
The muddle of medicalization: pathologizing or medicalizing?
Article in Theoretical medicine and bioethics, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 12 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
12 citing papers in PubMed.
- How to deal with controversies in the evaluation of medicalization: a case study of PMS and PMDD.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2026Article
- From Psychologia Anthropologica to Psychotherapeutics: A Reconstruction of the Development of the Idea of Medical Psychology From the 16th to the 19th Century.Journal of the history of the behavioral sciences · 2026Article
- An Ethical Analysis of Medicalization and Infant Mental Healthcare.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2026Article
- Age-related Gendered Diminishment: toward understanding and interventions for a common psychological experience in post-midlife women.Frontiers in psychology · 2025Article
- Labiaplasty in Minors: Medicalizing Mutilation?Archives of sexual behavior · 2025Article
- Experiences of Everyday Life among Individuals with Co-Existence of Serious Mental Illness and Cancer-A Qualitative Systematic Literature Review.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Review
- Lived Experience of Hereditary Chronic Pancreatitis - A Qualitative Interview Study.Chronic illness · 2022Article
- Enhancing Gender.Journal of bioethical inquiry · 2022Article
- The Precarious Space for Mourning: Sick Leave as an Ambiguous Topic in Bereaved Parents' Accounts of the Return to Everyday Life After Reproductive Loss.Culture, medicine and psychiatry · 2022Article
- Exploration of Intervention Strategies to Reduce Public Stigma Associated with Gambling Disorder.Journal of gambling studies · 2020Article
- Systems Medicine Disease: Disease Classification and Scalability Beyond Networks and Boundary Conditions.Frontiers in bioengineering and biotechnology · 2018Article
- Understanding disease and illness.Theoretical medicine and bioethics · 2017Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Medicalization appears to be an issue that is both ubiquitous and unquestionably problematic as it seems to signal at once a social and existential threat. This perception of medicalization, however, is nothing new. Since the first main writings in the 1960s and 1970s, it has consistently been used to describe inappropriate or abusive instances of medical authority. Yet, while this standard approach claims that medicalization is a growing problem, it assumes that there is simply one "medical model" and that the expanding realm of "the medical" can be more or less clearly delineated. Moreover, while intended to establish the reality of this growing threat, this research often requires making arbitrary or unjustified distinctions between different practices. To better clarify the concept of medicalization, I will focus more on capturing the variety of medical practices than on the sociological aspects of medical discourse. In doing so, I will explore the distinction between medicalization and pathologization, a distinction that is often overlooked and that brings with it many conceptual and practical implications. After defining these terms, I will use some examples to show that while pathologizing is closely tied to medicalizing, both can occur independently. I will then further develop this distinction in terms of the different individual and social effects of these practices.
Indexed as
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28674861What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.