ABSTRACT
These interventions involve established diagnostic technologies such as blood pressure measurements and techniques for lifestyle change. As such there is little new in this compared to what has been described in earlier texts on the new public health and individuals’ responsibility for their own health through self-regulatory behaviour (see Ogden 1995 and Petersen and Lupton 1996 for examples). What we witness is the medicalization of life, which has been going on for some time already. There have been developments over the past decade, however, that are worth noting. An escalation of the medicalization of life has taken place, through the pathologization of normality and the removal of the divide between preventive and clinical medicine. This latter change is demonstrated by the replacement of lifestyle changes by chemical prevention as the major mode of achieving the goals of preventive medicine.
