Terms
secularization
medical excusing
social control
deviance
demedicalization
professionalization

1. Medicine replacing religion as a framework for understanding personal well being.
   1. Anorexia nervosa as a version of spiritual perfectionism directed outward, towards the body, as a modern version of the sort of extremism some religious people become committed to.
   2. Personal responsibility for maintaining one's health develops the kind of moral quality that used to guide personal behavior control in relationship to religious life.
      1. In terms of avoiding negative (or sinful) life styles
      2. In terms of following personal (spiritual) disciplines intended to maintain focus and positive feeling (working out as a contemporary replacement for religious practices like morning mass)
      3. Viewing emotional "incorrectness" as a source of life problems; where religion might have focused on sinful thoughts, we talk about excessively hard-driving personalities (Type A vs. Type B) or interpersonal oppression as sources of disease.
   3. Physicians are symbols of and embodiments of authority in personal and community life; in the past the role of confessor and comforter in the face of life hardships was taken by clergy.
2. Sickness as deviance (taken from Talcott Parsons' concept of the sick role and also from labeling theory in sociology).
   1. The idea of deviance
   2. The sick role as a non-stigmatized form of deviance, but where ill health is inextricably connected to the involvement of a physician providing required care.
   3. The idea of social control in relationship to deviance
   4. Social agents as controllers; control becomes separated from social system needs to maintain smooth interdependence and the division of labor.
      1. Labeling, reaction, and secondary deviation
      2. Doctors
         1. As identifiers and approvers of disease
         2. Medical technology (like drugs) as processes that implement control
         3. Loose connection between scientific knowledge and actions of doctors as agents of social control
      3. Sociologists have been concerned about medicalization because the domain of medical involvement and control has expanded
         1. One aspect is that medical judgments and commands are not easily questioned so those subjected to social control find it hard to get their point of view taken seriously
         2. Sociologists dislike that medical interpretations by nature define social problems as "in" the individual so that the social context in which a person lives does not receive attention as a source of causes for personal problems.
   5. Professionalization vs. medicalization
      1. Medicalization tends to lead to control for treatment of a problem by professionals (professionalization)
         1. Professionalization tends to result in increased diagnosis and treatment because the professionals are there and need something to do
         2. Professionals tend to make problems more elaborate so that they do not get bored and so that their specialty seems more important
         3. Medical professionals may become coercive in forcing clients to receive treatment; as such they may work in partnership with the legal system.
         4. Considering that medical knowledge is not perfect and that medical professionals are very powerful compared to clients, this coerciveness is a matter of concern to sociologists.
      2. Medicalization itself represents more a system of cultural or social beliefs that a social problem should be understood as medical in character.
         1. Sociologists generally understand medicalization, and criticize it, as a way of transforming moral and social problems into medical problems as a way of making them into a different form of deviance.
         2. As a process of cultural belief, we can recognize that medicalization can lead to demedicalization. This often happens when subjects of a supposed condition object
            1. Homosexuality
            2. Disability