What is Medicalisation?
Medicalisation is the procedure by which any human issues and conditions becomes defined and treated as the medical conditions and thereby is considered to be the subject of medical study, diagnosis, prevention as well as treatment. Studies have shown that Medicalisation is driven by new hypotheses and evidences about conditions mainly by the changing of the social attitudes and economic considerations or by the developing new medications (van et al. 2016). Medicalisation is therefore seen to be studied from sociological perspectives in terms of the power as well as the role of the professionals, corporations and even patients and for its implications for the ordinary people because of their self-identity and life, decisions might be depending on the prevailing concept of health and illness (Browne et al. 2017). Medicalisation is also referred as pathologization by several studies. A good number of studies have argued Medicalisation as the benefitting attribute to the human society (Browne et al. 2017; Tradii and Robert 2017; Goossensen 2016) This is because Medicalisation is the social process through which a condition becomes a medical disorder in requirement of treatments. This assignment will discuss about the various aspects associated as the Medicalisation of death in the western society and shed light on the sociological perspective.
According to Smith (2018), Medicalisation of death can be explained as the form of medical treatment that is seen to be concentrating on the reduction of the pain and suffering of the people. It never tries to delay or speed up the progression of death. It is nowadays considered to be a part of the hospice care or the palliative care. One of the studies have seen to critique the Medicalisation of death as the loss of capacity of the present day healthcare industry (Tradii and Robert 2017). They declined to accept the normal birth death cycle and intervene to change its actual timing in the life of the affected patients. Secondly, the researchers have also witnessed being the compitition against the components of death at each and every life stage. Third, Medicalisation of death comprises of a crippling if family as well as personal care and results in devaluing of the different types of traditional rituals that surround death and dying techniques. van Wijngaarden, Leget and Goossensen (2016) have criticised Medicalisation of death as the form of social control in which a form of rejection of the “patient hood” is witnessed by dying of the bereaved people which is labelled as a form of deviance.
Smith et al. (2018) stated that the gradual advancement of Medicalisation of death can be well explained with the four specific forms of innovations that crept in the healthcare industry. One of the shifts was seen to occur in the study of dying individual’s care from the concept of idiosyncratic anecdote to that of systemic observation and research. At that time, leading journal articles and researchers working on healthcare topics were trying to suggest different methods by which terminal care is promoted and several contrasting point of view for euthanasia could be encountered.
Medicalisation of Death: Definition and Explanation
Fleming et al. (2016) described the other aspect that also marked the acceptance of Medicalisation of the death and he stated that a passive approach was replaced by the active approach towards the care of the dying people. Here, the fatalistic resignation of the healthcare professionals (who uttered the common phrase of “there is nothing more that can be done from our side”) was replaced and thereby supplanted by the determination of finding new as well as imaginative methods to continue caring up to the end of life. Another aspect that was also noticed by Donato (2016) was the enhncing gratitude of the interdependency of the physical and mental distress and this had resulted in creation of a more personified notion of suffering. This had resulted in constituting several challenges to the body and mind dualism on which high amount of medical practice was predicted. This had resulted in development of the concept of hospice care, home care as well as day care services. Hospital units, support teams started to be arranged and recruited accordingly, and all aspects were designed for bringing the new concept and thinking about death and dying into the heartlands of acute care medications.
On the other hand, Arnason (2017) described the huge amount of negative aspects that he found to be intricately associated with the concept of the Medicalisation and commodization of death. Yet although palliative care had effectively encouraged medications to be towards the gentler sides in their acceptance towards death and parallel developments in the medical systems had doubled efforts on the contradictory direction. When it comes to the negative aspects of this, it includes the issues of the futile treatments that either produces and effect which has no benefitting outcomes on the patient or have a very low chance of having an effect on the patient’s health. Some of the other thoughts that have turned out to be a negative aspect of the Medicalisation of the death is that every death could be resisted, avoided or even postponed.
One of the article by Tradii and Robert (2017) also gave a good insight about the effects of Medicalisation of death on the healthcare industry. In the UK, about 25 percent of the occupied healthcare home bed days were seen to be occupied by the healthcare service users who were in their last years of life and about sixty percent of their deaths occur there. 37 percent of the healthcare service users who had been admitted to the United Kingdom intensive care units are seen to be dying within the six months and the bill was estimated to be increasing by five percent annually. One of the researcher Greenwood (2015) had stated that the modern epidemic of multiple organ failure overheads twice as much to death within the intensive care as it does in surviving outside. Hence, it shows that Medicalisation of death is seen to be associated with huge expenditure of healthcare resources in the western nations resulting in strenuous effects on the funding systems.
Positive and Negative Aspects of Medicalisation of Death
From the above articles, many important points can be jotted into a summary to understand the whole picture of medicalisation of death. The initial decade before medicalisation of death, the concept of death was rather different than it is today. Throughout the world, death as well as different rituals surrounding them was steeped in taboos. Death was celebrated, embraced and feared in the earlier centuries. Different types of cultures used to put different types of diverse restrictions and practices associated with clothing, rituals and food when they used to consider the concepts of death and dying procedures (MacArtney et al., 2016). Death, dying and grieving in the proper traditional model possessed an important part of the everyday cultural practicesTherefore, the ordeal of dying was never just personal but was also considered to be communal.
The concept of dying is now deeply feared and therefore a new image had replaced the acceptance in traditional pattern. Specifically, it had lead to the widespread pretence that suffering, death; dying and grief do not exist. Technological achievement as well as dependence on the technologies has enabled the healthcare industry in actively fighting against dying. This had lead to forestalling death for the countless numbers of individuals (Lam et al. 2016). In the technological framework, death is no longer considered natural, necessary and as a significance part of life. The present concept was considering that success lies controlling and defeating death and the failure to do that is defined as the inability of the healthcare industry. These social changes have thereby resulted in rising to a new model for death. Here, dying and grieving is anatomised and even disconnected from daily life resulting in social isolation. Medicalisation of death had resulted in society and humanity losing the capacity for accepting death and suffering as the meaningful aspects of life always being a in the state of “total war” against death at all stages of the life cycle.
Medicalisation and commoditization of death has caused people to want to die at home but they mainly die in the hospitals. Árnason 2017 stated that commoditization of death poses a never ending threat in the medical industry. This concept also supports the fact that everybody must be having at least provided his or her chance in the intensive care before being allowed to die. Researchers are of the opinion that palliative care started as a response for medicalisation of death but now had become a part of the medicalisation of death (Bregman 2017). Now modern western culture wants death to be pain free. They also believe in the open acknowledgement of the imminence of death. The society also wants death at home and advises people to be surrounded by family as well as friends. Now, death needs to be modified according to personal preferences and in ways that resonate with the individuality of the person.
Medicalisation and commoditization of death are associated with negative points as it devalues and destroys non-medical traditional procedures of managing difficulties. Many treatments are there which have potential side effects. It has been also found huge amount of healthcare resources are being spent on the certain critical disorders that have fewer scopes to provide better quality lives (Leonard et al., 2017).
From the above discussion, it has been found that medicalisation and commoditization of death where death is no more concerned a natural aspect of life and is considered to be a medical problem. Therefore, course of death is often tried to be controlled and managed as the present day society visualises death as something that needs to be avoided. It had resulted in huge economic outflow in every western nation and had affected cultural traditions of different societies over years.
References:
Árnason, A., 2017. Death as resource: a story of organ donation and communication across the ‘great mist’in Iceland. Medicine Anthropology Theory, pp.23-45.
Bregman, L., 2017. Dying in Five Stages: Death and Emotions in Kübler-Ross and Her Influence. Pakistan Journal of Historical Studies, 2(2), pp.33-61.
Browne, J., Reeves, M. and Beca, J.P., 2017. End of Life in Chile: What Can We Learn from Death Cafes. Hos Pal Med Int Jnl, 1(4), p.00019.
Donato, M.P., 2016. Sudden death: Medicine and religion in eighteenth-century Rome. Routledge, pp. 12-15.
Fleming, J., Farquhar, M., Brayne, C., Barclay, S. and Cambridge City over-75s Cohort (CC75C) study collaboration, 2016. Death and the oldest old: attitudes and preferences for end-of-life care-qualitative research within a population-based cohort study. PloS one, 11(4), p.e0150686.
Greenwood, S., 2015. Discussing death matters. Dynamics of Human Health (DHH), 2(4).
Lam, V., Kain, N., Joynt, C. and van Manen, M.A., 2016. A descriptive report of end-of-life care practices occurring in two neonatal intensive care units. Palliative medicine, 30(10), pp.971-978.
Leonard, R., Horsfall, D., Noonan, K. and Rosenberg, J., 2017. Identity and the end?of?life story: A role for psychologists. Australian Psychologist, 52(5), pp.346-353.
MacArtney, J.I., Broom, A., Kirby, E., Good, P., Wootton, J. and Adams, J., 2016. Locating care at the end of life: burden, vulnerability, and the practical accomplishment of dying. Sociology of health & illness, 38(3), pp.479-492.
Smith, R., Blazeby, J., Bleakley, T., Clark, J., Cong, Y., Durie, R., Finkelstein, E., Gafer, N., Gugliani, S., Horton, R. and Johnson, M., 2018. Lancet Commission on the Value of Death. The Lancet, 392(10155), pp.1291-1293.
Tradii, L. and Robert, M., 2017. Do we deny death? II. Critiques of the death-denial thesis. Mortality, pp.1-12.
van Wijngaarden, E., Leget, C. and Goossensen, A., 2016. Disconnectedness from the here-and-now: a phenomenological perspective as a counteract on the medicalisation of death wishes in elderly people. Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, 19(2), pp.265-273.
Order an Essay Now & Get These Features For Free:
Turnitin Report
Formatting
Title Page
Citation
Outline
