This "medicalization" or pathologizing of grief may be embraced by pharmaceutical companies, which may now see an emerging market of grievers open to the suggestion to consult a physician if they are struggling with a loss.
As a critical sociological tool, a medicalization lens provides a valuable way to uncover some of the limitations and implications of the global health agenda.
All of these approaches are focused on what public health scholars call the "medicalization" of a disease: either finding new cures or giving out drugs.
In other words, industry has a stake in medicalization because such a framing of NCDs serves its interests.
Contemporary sociological analyses recognise complexity in medicalization: the fact that medicalization is a process not just an outcome, it can be both positive and negative, partial rather than complete, and can be sought by patients, doctors or other actors in the health field, as well as be resisted or challenged (8, 11, 12).
Box 1. Medicalization lens Medicalization is a process by which human problems come to be defined and treated as medical problems.
Medicalization is a process by which human problems come to be defined and treated as medical problems.
It is important to optimize the identification of LGA fetuses in utero at term if one hopes to prevent maternal or neonatal complications by recommending a policy of induced labor before 39 weeks and to avoid futile medicalization of a pregnancy for which fetal weight was overestimated.
Medicalization is a concept developed in the 1970s to define aspects of life as medical problems previously outside of the jurisdiction of medicine [ 30- 32].
For some writers and activists, medicalization is just a power grab, and its arch-villains are a greedy pharmaceutical industry and an arrogant psychiatric profession, which together have pushed pills for states of mind about which nothing can be done, or should be done, and which rightly belong to the realm of individual moral responsibility.
