The medicalization of life

Abstract

The medicalization of life has to do with a fundamental belief that medicine can decisively affect all events of human life. This belief is based on the assumption that life is basically a medical issue, as it has been reduced to its biological concept, and it is medicine, with its scientific knowledge and technical power that supports it. This text presents an analysis of the ideas that sustain this belief. To do so, it considers the resignification, in the light of science, of the concepts of body, sickness and health, turning them into what Agamben calls the immanent sacred, and the role played by the evidence- based medicine, the prevention and by the medication in this resignification. Finally, it associates medicalization with biopolitics, considering the use that the latter makes of medicine to establish moral and legal judgments.