The approach to AIDS as a disease and a threat for social discrimination is used as an example to illustrate a conceptual thesis. This thesis is a claim that concerns what we call a medical issue or not, what is medicalised or needs to be demedicalised. In the friction between medicalisation and demedicalisation as discursive strategies the latter approach can only be effected through the emplo...

The classification of depression has been debated for decades. The introduction of operational criteria and the category of major depression were significant advances in the 1970s. However, the validity of the major depression category is controversial. The article highlights the limitations of using severity criteria and cross-sectional evaluation to diagnose depression. It recommends the clas...

This paper explores how the concept of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) is constructed through Spanish media and documentary films and how it is represented. The article analyses three documentary films and the cultural and social contexts in and from which they emerged: Solé ́s Bucarest: la memòria perduda [Bucharest: Memory Lost] (2007), Bosch ́s Bicicleta, cullera, poma [Bicycle, Spoon, Apple] (2010) ...

Drawing on Foucault’s (1977) analysis of ‘political anatomy’, Armstrong (1983; 1995) argues that the 20th Century marked a shift in the clinical gaze, from a focus on the interior of the body, to a focus that both explored the body in relation to its exterior and to the collective body. Armstrong (1995) describes this new mechanism of power as ‘surveillance medicine’. In what others have descri...

With around five million people accessing anti-retroviral treatment, which significantly reduces mortality and extends life, the HIV pandemic now exists in a context of treatment possibility, if not access. This paper discusses ways in which the pandemic is becoming naturalised through medicalisation, normalisation and marketisation, and how these processes undermine themselves internally. The ...

A number of birth centres were established in New South Wales as a result of the Shearman Report (NSW Health Department 1989). The objective of this study was to compare the obstetric outcomes, primarily caesarean section rates, of low-risk women presenting in spontaneous labour to the birth centre with those attending the hospital's conventional labour ward. The study showed that there was no ...

In spite of the vast amount of medical data at our disposal, there are limitations and drawbacks of medical care. This is due to the defective medical knowledge - the restricted narrow concepts of human being, illness, etiology and treatment. This has resulted in undue emphasis on physical aspect of human existence ignoring the mental and spiritual aspects in understanding the illness and treat...

Available online 10 July 2008 For many years, radical feminists have been warning about the dangers inherent in the use of Hormone Replacement Therapy. Until the release of the Women's Health Initiative results in 2002, these warnings were dismissed and discredited. In this article I summarise these recent debates. In addition, I also draw upon findings from my doctoral research, the first stud...

Summary Using the journal of Dutch Diabetics Association (Nederlandse Vereniging van Suikerzieken), article provides insight into role an early patient organisation in conceptualising chronic disease diabetes and its management Netherlands between 1945 1970. The dual aims discipline (steered by health professionals) independence diabetics) were reconciled through concept balance during 1940s 19...

In an interesting article Wieteke van Dijk and colleagues argue that societal developments and values influence the practice of medicine, and thus can result in both medicalisation and overdiagnosis. They provide a convincing argument that overdiagnosis emerges in a social context and that it has socially constructed implications. However, they fail to show that overdiagnosis per se is socially...