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Medicalization in America


Rosenberg takes on a similar view in "The Tyranny of Diagnosis ", where he discusses the power behind diagnosis and how diagnosis can influence us and our diseases. Rosenberg argues that throughout the past, our understanding of disease has evolved from evaluating a single personal experience to the type of specific diagnostics we have today. Diagnosis today tends to exists outside of the individual and has now become commercialized in the form of disease manuals, television advertisements, and various resources on the internet. While Rosenberg discusses that medicalization has indeed become a much more commercialized and bureaucratic procedure, it does not take away from the fact that its main purpose over the past 200 years has been to diagnose illness, in whatever convenient form the individual chooses to seek. Through Rosenberg's argument, medicalization has elevated more towards treating illness as diagnosis elevates away from the individual experience and more towards treating and dealing with the disease itself.
             Medicalization is a process that is used not only to define what is healthy, but also what is normal. While medicalization is meant to be a process to assist those who are ill, it has also transformed into one where those who ARE ill are then labeled as not normal and cursed with this social stigma placed about them. Quite often in the past medicalization has been used to treat conditions that may not even be considered actual illnesses, but are being medicalized simply because they are not normal. When then define what is and is not normal within society based on the categories and conditions that we medicalize and those we do not. Take Ami Harbin's article "Disorientation and the Medicalization of Struggle ". Harbin discusses much about the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and what it takes for a disease to actually be diagnosed as a mental disorder.


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