A New Era of Medical Consumption: Medicalisation Revisited

When Ivan Illich launched his critique on the medical establishment, medicalisation became synonym for a perverted evolution in western health care. Since then, it has been most of the time used as a critique to the oppression by the health establishment of which the subjects suffer, culminating in the call for resistance against this system. The world has changed profoundly, including medicine, since Illich criticized medicine, and so must our analysis of it be. Today, instead of resisting against medicine or medicalisation, most of us do everything they can to participate in it. Unless our governments prevent us from it, are we not doing everything we can to overuse the system, to consume medicine as much as possible? Medicalisation therefore is at a turning point. We want to unravel its current analytical potential and attempt for a renewed analysis in contemporary society and medicine. If social critique will still be of importance in tomorrow’s medicine, much will depend upon the way we deal with this crucial question.