HLTHAGE 2L03 Chapter Notes - Chapter 1: Medicalization, Biomedicine, Psychosis
29 Jan 2020
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Document Summary
Pathology, identity and the social construction of alcohol dependence. Its not that addiction to alcohol has been medicalized but rather, over a period of. 2 centuries the medicalizing project was not fully successful. At end of 19th c. alcohol addiction was primarily a medical condition, not evidence of personal weakness or failure. Medicalization of addictions has grown to be a variety of things all in which are able to undermine individual volition. Beginning of 19th c. - ^ this process began. Involved a gradual intruding of medicine into areas of social life that had previously been constituted as moral domains. Key problem for medical understanding of addiction as a product of a disease processes: is the absence of casual mechanism that can be understood in terms of objective pathology, rather than through subjective experimental factors (susceptibility vs culpability) This readings concern is to explain the ways that this medicalization as become successful.
