MEANING
1. The process of treating a condition, experience or social issue as a medical problem.
2. The increasing use of medical language, methods or procedures within an activity or area of life.
Use it for
analyzing an experience being defined as illness; examining expanding medical authority over everyday life; distinguishing medical framing from proof of a biological cause; discussing how diagnostic language changes a social issueSeparates framing something as a medical issue from establishing that it has a particular medical cause. Writing functions: Theory / Conceptual Language.
Words that belong together
- medicalization of everyday life
- medicalization of distress
- process of medicalization
On the page
The essay examines the medicalization of ordinary sadness without denying the need to treat serious illness.
Changes in advertising contributed to the medicalization of experiences previously discussed in moral or social terms.
The history traces the medicalization of childbirth through changing settings, attendants and procedures.
The authors assess the medicalization of care separately from the question of which interventions improve outcomes.
Word forms
- Base
- medicalization
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Usage notes
Normally uncountable as a process noun. UK medicalisation is an alias. A description of framing or practice, not a clinical diagnosis. Register: academic. Commonness: moderately common in social science (qualitative editorial estimate, informed by dictionaries/corpus).
Practice this word in a sentenceYour margin notes
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