Old and new actors and phenomena in the Three-M processes of life and society: Medicalization, moralization and misinformation

Abstract

Medicalization has been a key concept in the field of the sociology of health and illness over the past 50 years, capturing the expanding social control of everyday life by medical experts [1,2,3,4]. Sociologists and other social scientists have used this concept most generally to refer to a negative development of abusive medical authority in Western societies, although medical doctors are not the only agents in the medicalization process, and the relationship between the highly technoscientific biomedical and lay perspectives is multidirectional, multi-sited, and of increasing complexity in the context of pluralist and global societies [5,6,7,8].