Biomedicalization Revisited

This chapter describes highlights in the career of the concept of biomedicalization since 2010, including brief overviews of special issues of journals in other disciplines and languages. It focuses on three major topics examined by other scholars through biomedicalization lenses: the media; medical devices and technologies; and precision medicine and precision public health. The concept of biomedicalization generically subsumes geneticization and pharmaceuticalization, especially through constitutive processes of technoscientization and transformations of biomedical knowledge production and consumption. Public health entities utilize unconventional data sets such as internet search trends and cell phone GPS data to track flows of people, exposures, and movements of health risks. Many scholars in sociology, anthropology and science studies examine stratifications productive of medical and public health knowledge and practices. The chapter concludes with discussion of current issues in biomedicalization including COVID‐19 and climate change, and note anticipated future directions.