The Languages of Medicalisation

Abstract

The complexity of the scenarios that mark our modern world's variegated articulation and structure of individual identity, traversed by multiple tensions and characterised by a form of plasticity, express in a paradigmatic manner a dialectical intersection between dimensions of humanity which are embodied in an existential praxis: the interaction between the technical dimension in all its meanings and the social level generates a uniquely existential viewpoint with an intimate processuality. In the perspective of a social dialectic of technical facts, what proves to be essential in the immediate term is a consideration of the impact on our everyday life: individual existence and its socially structured form acquire and metabolise technical facts in a complex manner, rewriting and reinterpreting their points of meaning and the dynamics of everyday life, based on the capacity that technology itself has to re-shape the reality, potential and prospects of individual lives. At the centre of these evaluations remains the person in his or her capacity as an inhabitant of the social universe and a constructor and user of technology. A consideration of the impact on different planes of existence is a question that concerns people firstly from a generalised perspective relating to the interpretation of existence as a whole and secondly from a local perspective that concerns situational perception and therefore an individual encounter with a technical fact and the specific impact it can have on a person. The potential impacts and substantial weight of medicalisation as a reconfiguration of the social universe are constructed within these spaces. The relocation of the functional spheres of the healthcare profession in people's social lives identifies an essential task for each practitioner: transferring the evaluative, descriptive and explanatory languages of medicalisation to a concrete level of individual existence in its social dimension implies reshaping that dimension by giving it new and complex meanings. It also means interpreting medicalisation's interests as forms of social existence.

Keywords: Biomedical; Healthcare; Medicalisation.