Outside Forces 'Medicalizing' Everyday Problems, Experts Say

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"The appearance of racialized drugs on pharmacist's shelves only increases the need to attend to the myriad social sources of disparities in morbidity and mortality," Duster wrote. "Although to turn a profit from fighting racial discrimination is difficult, effective medical care requires continued awareness of the complex social dimensions of diseases, such as hypertension and cancer."

Cindy Patton, professor of sociology and anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada, wrote of changes that have occurred in the evolution of treatment of HIV/AIDS because of the new accent on medicalization.

Because of the impact of HIV care on other aspects of health -- for example, cardiovascular well-being -- HIV-positive patients and their doctors are increasingly aware of trends across a wide variety of medical specialities. In many cases, these specialities -- such as virology and cardiovascular disease -- used to have little in common, Patton explained.

However, "The distance between biomedical specialties that might once have been bridged mainly by researchers and specialized clinicians now is negotiated mainly by the patients themselves, since their knowledge sets expand and intertwine over time," she wrote.

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