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INTRODUCTION
The concept of medicalisation has been widely employed by social scientists, over the last three decades, to refer to the processes by which social phenomena come to be perceived and treated as illnesses. 'Classic' examples of medicalisation described by sociologists include both deviant behaviours, such as recurrent excess alcohol consumption (Schneider, 1978) and hyperactivity in children (Conrad, 1975), and natural body processes, such as ageing (Zola, 1991), pregnancy (Oakley, 1984) menopause (McCrea, 1983) and death (Clarke, 2002). Although particularly associated with medical sociology, the concept has been used in other academic disciplines, including the biomedical sciences, law, and ethics, with authors identifying a diverse range of behaviours and conditions as having been medicalised. For example, Cermark (1998) suggests that marijuana consumption has been medicalised through its legal use for medical purposes. It has also been argued that so-called compulsive buying has been medicalised through the use of medication and cognitive behavioural therapy to control this behaviour (Lee and Mysyk, 2004).
Originally, the concept was strongly associated with the notion of medical dominance; with a general trend towards medicalisation being causally linked to the medical profession's apparently inexorably increasing cultural and social authority. Latterly, however, the idea of a docile lay populace, in thrall to expansionist medicine, has been questioned by many medical sociologists. Thus, it is suggested that increased concerns over risks, both health and non-health related, and the challenging of expert authority and scientific knowledge, has led to a modern day 'consumer' of healthcare who is seen as playing an active role in bringing about or resisting medicalisation. This has led to the need for closer consideration of the specific social contexts in which the different dimensions of medicalisation arise, and for further clarification of how the concept can be used to describe social phenomena. Moreover, as sociological attention has turned, since the late 1980s, to consider the putative decline of medical dominance, the idea that medicalisation is an inevitable or irreversible process, has become less plausible. Indeed, it is conceivable, that if, as Conrad and Schneider (1992) argued, medicalisation as a general societal trend is particularly associated with modernity, and if we are now entering a post-modern era, then one might expect to see an increase in demedicalisation (Elston et al....