ABSTRACT
The medicalization of society represents a totalizing process of assimilation of a wide range of cultural activities and values into a medical model. In contrast to the assimilation model, the medical accommodates other discourses such as the psychological, sociological and anthropological, as one amongst a number of explanatory approaches. Thomas Szasz’s “medicalization thesis” follows from earlier work in which he debunks modern psychiatry partly as a discipline that invents the conditions it treats. As a psychiatrist, Szasz, following Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, is largely concerned with the medicalization of behaviour and mind. “Upstreamism” works too in a model proposed by a medical doctor in California, Rishi Manchanda. Traditions of self-help permeate mainstream medical education, the centre of gravity of which for over a century has been North America. As a result of over-production of doctors, Cuba has established a global network of the provision of medical workers, particularly for emerging nations and for emergencies.
