Theoretical and Conceptual Approaches and Results of the Empirical Study of Medicalization Phenomenon (Literature Review)

In modern society, human health is a component of the economic factor of labor and the main resource of work capacity, ensuring a high quality of human life. The development of medical science and public health as a social institution ensures the influence of medicine on a person’s daily life, and is associated with the emergence of a social phenomenon of medicalization in society. Its essence lies in the perception of human life as a medical problem, a person - as a patient, and his body and consciousness - as objects of medical control and regulation. Social agents of medicalization are medical and pharmaceutical workers, teachers, journalists, sick and healthy people. The pharmaceutical companies and the media have a decisive role in maintaining and developing medicalization. At the same time, an increase in the scope of medicalization is not accompanied by an improvement in individual, group and public health, but on the contrary creates new risks and dangers in society. The situation is exacerbated by the risk of disrupting the balance of the social institutions of society. The article presents data on the analysis of methodological grounds and scientific results of studying the phenomenon of medicalization as a subject of research in the social, medical and psychological sciences. The purpose of the study is to understand the phenomenon of medicalization from the standpoint of Western and domestic theoretical and conceptual approaches to its study and the terminology used for application in medical and social studies of health and public health. The justification of the negative social meaning of the phenomenon of medicalization which calls for the development of effective methods of coping is given. In the course of the research an analytical method was used in combination with a scientific and theoretical approach; materials of 58 sources of literature including 28 scientific publications of foreign authors, were studied.