ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the expansion of the use of pharmaceuticals by outlining the process of medicalisation and more recent developments in biomedicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation. A number of strategies that facilitate the expanded use of pharmaceuticals are outlined, including the designation of more conditions as medical problems, the development of increasingly sophisticated screening procedures, diagnostic inflation, shifting diagnostic thresholds and the developments of proto-illnesses and personalised medicine. Increasing technological capacities from genetic and communication technologies provide further opportunities for the expansion of medicine. These changes disrupt concepts of the normal and the pathological as new technologies can mark everyone as having a physiological risk of developing disease and so potentially a target of preventive medications. Pharmaceuticals are being used to combat what have previously been viewed as normal biological processes of deterioration, and are used to enhance functioning beyond the normal. A fascinatingly intricate interplay of actors, technologies and biologies facilitate the expansion of pharmaceutical-based therapeutics.
