Medicalization is the conversion of a health condition, circumstance or behavior into a medical issue. The medicalization of an issue makes it subject to scientific intervention and the prescription of medication. Medicalization has the effect of availing medical care to persons who would have otherwise lived with these conditions. It thus reduces their suffering and improves their quality of life Medicalization has the effect of highlighting the conditions through research, medical trials and eventually treatment of the said conditions.
The consequences of medicalization include the individualization of problems that in large fact affect many people in society. This results in lower consideration of the political and social contexts that these problems occur in. Also, medicalization creates an environment where human differences are treated as abnormal and requiring treatment; pathologization.
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A condition that today has been greatly medicalized is obesity. Whereas morbid obesity does require treatment more and more people are being pushed into this category due to medicalization. Thus more generally overweight individuals are being categorised as sick and requiring various forms of treatment.
Upstream factors are the factors outside medicine that affect health. They include social structure of the health system, environmental, economic, physical and governmental factors. They influence healthy behaviour by virtue of the individuals knowledge and access to healthy choices, influences and opportunities that result in healthy behaviour. Macro theorists view the result of this disparity in social factors as a direct correlation to the low mortality, higher teenage pregnancy, morbid obesity and general ill health of those without as opposed to those with.
Talcott Parsons Sick Role Concept describes the privileges and tasks that sick people have. The understanding that Parsons had was that all people are expected to be productive and give value in society. The exception to this rule is when a person falls ill. In this case one cannot be required to perform all their normal duties and therefore is considered exempt from them until they feel better. Also they cannot be held responsible for their ill health. However, the sick person is required to focus on getting better and acquiring treatment for their ailment. The ill persons role must be legitimized by a medical professional as only then are they viewed as being entitled to the benefits and responsibilities discussed above.
Functionalism views the world as a system of interconnected parts that function together to achieve stability for all. As such illness is considered allowed deviance from the system described above. Deviance in this context means a state or action that defies normal cultural and legal laws. Parsons a functionalist himself developed sick role theory to explain this change from the norm. The importance of illness being viewed as deviance is answered in part by one of the rights of ill people. They cannot be blamed for their condition. Illness is not something that a person in the functionalist perspective desires for themselves as they are forced to do things out of the norm. The ill persons inability to perform their role in society is not unattended by choice but by circumstance.
It is also important that illness is perceived as deviance to ensure that those that are differently abled can then be viewed in society as unconditional legitimate. By being in this category of the sick role they are understood to still be members of society though not fully functioning and fulfilling the requirements of an able bodied individual in the society. It is understood that their abilities may be limited to a certain number of functions as opposed to those of the rest of society and may remain that way in perpetuity.
