Quotes About Medicalization

At the onset of labor, the woman was placed in the lithotomy (supine) position, chloroformed, and turned into the completely passive body on which the obstetrician could perform as on a mannequin. The labor room became an operating theatre, and childbirth a medical drama with the physician as its hero.

Yet weirdly, even as our societies have become more medicalized, our experience of death has turned more remote. Death itself is more horrifying and unthinkable than ever. Serious technologists now truly believe they will be able to cheat the reaper for all eternity by uploading their consciousnesses into the ether.

The challenge of the politics of atypicality becomes particularly pressing within neoliberal biopolitics, particularly in that much of disability's social oppression is based on medical classifications that overindividuate bodies within categories of pathology while turning labeled subjects into generic representations of their medicalized condition group.

Diagnostic inflation has led to an explosive growth in the use of psychotropic drugs; this then produced huge profits that have given the pharmaceutical industry the means and the motive to blow up the diagnostic bubble into an ever-expanding balloon.

the drug companies had to get an indication for bipolar disorder and then they had to advertise a conception of bipolar disorder so broad as to be unrecognizable. Antipsychotics were soon being prescribed promiscuously, even by primary care physicians, to patients with garden-variety anxiety, sleeplessness, and irritability.

Mental disorders should be diagnosed only when the presentation is clear-cut, severe, and clearly not going away on its own. The best way to deal with the everyday problems of living is to solve them directly or to wait them out, not to medicalize them with a psychiatric diagnosis or treat them with a pill.

People live longer and better than at any other time in history. But scientific advances have turned the processes of aging and dying into medical experiences, matters to be managed by health care professionals. And we in the medical world have proved alarmingly unprepared for it.

it would be a big mistake if medicalization is all that happens." Why a mistake? Because Bob Jesse was ultimately less interested in people's mental problems than with their spiritual well-being—in using entheogens for the betterment of well people.

13 to $20 billion a year could be saved in health care costs by demedicalizing childbirth, developing midwifery, and encouraging breastfeeding.

Just being female made women candidates for perpetual medical care, because doctors began treating all the normal passages of their lives—puberty, menstruation, childbirth, and menopause—as illnesses.

Why is ADHD so much more common in the United States today than it was 30 or 40 years ago? And why is it so much more common today in the United States than elsewhere? My answer is "the medicalization of misbehavior.

The words with which a breakdown is treated are all medicalised - illness, treatment, nurse, doctor, meds - but the mechanism of treatment belongs to retribution: incarnation, surveillance, behaviour monitoring, parole. For crimes against normality, we get a label and a chemical life sentence. I hate this mechanism. I refuse to believe in it.

Once upon a time, drug companies promoted drugs to treat diseases. Now it is often the opposite. They promote diseases to fit their drugs.

the total number of pregnancies in which powerful and dangerous drugs are used is 60 percent, or nearly two-thirds of all births. It is rediculous to think that two-thirds of American women have such lousy uteruses that they must be whipped into shape with drugs in order to have babies.