Biomedicalization: Technoscientific Transformations of Health, Illness, and U.S. Biomedicine

By Adele E. Clarke, Janet K Shim, Laura Mamo, J. Fosket, J. Fishman. American Sociological Review, 2003

1,577 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The first social transformation of American medicine institutionally established medicine by the end of World War II. In the next decades, medicalization—the expansion of medical jurisdiction, authority, and practices into new realms—became widespread. Since about 1985, dramatic changes in both the organization and practices of contemporary biomedicine, implemented largely through the integration of technoscientific innovations, have been coalescing into what the authors call biomedicalization, a second “transformation “ of American medicine. Biomedicalization describes the increasingly complex, multisited, multidirectional processes of medicalization, both extended and reconstituted through the new social forms of highly technoscientific biomedicine. The historical shift from medicalization to biomedicalization is one from control over biomedical phenomena to transformations of them. Five key interactive processes both engender biomedicalization and are produced through it: (1) the political economic reconstitution of the vast sector of biomedicine; (2) the focus on health itself and the elaboration of risk and surveillance biomedicines; (3) the increasingly technological and scientific nature of biomedicine; (4) transformations in how biomedical knowledges are produced, distributed, and consumed, and in medical information management; and (5) transformations of bodies to include new properties and the production of new individual and collective technoscientific identities.

Subfields: Pharmacology, Psychiatry and Mental health, Philosophy

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ce7d0b8ee460c5482b38f772c194b23a3729561b

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

1. S. Shostak
2. Carl R May
3. D. Eton
4. Kasey R. Boehmer
5. F. Mair
6. J. Freese
7. K. Gallacher
8. Katherine J Hunt

Citations in the corpus

• The long and winding road (2018, positive): “From the outset, we had a shared interest in exploring how biomedicalisation of HIV was, and is, unfolding in the UK context (Clarke et al., 2003; Nguyen, 2010; Squire 2013), specifically through the repurposing of ARVs for prevention and attentive to the ways in which these global claims and…”
• Health Lifestyle Theory and the Convergence of Agency and Structure∗ (2005, background): “if they do not (Clarke et al. 2003).”
• Rethinking the patient: using Burden of Treatment Theory to understand the changing dynamics of illness (2014, background): “Being a patient has come to involve managed engagement with multiple healthcare practices that are consequences of the therapeutic revolution of the 1950s and 1960s [36], the emergence of a massive and global biomedical-industrial complex from the 1970s [37], and important developments in the life s”
• Genetics and Social Inquiry (2009, background): “Biosocial research describes several ways that genetic knowledge expands the place of biomedical categories in everyday life (Clarke et al. 2003).”