Medicalization of Complementary and Alternative Medicine: a Historical-Critical Analysis

Abstract

Medicalization, in the sense of expansion of medicine in different aspects of human life and ultimately the transformation of medicine into a tool of social control and domination, is a common interpenetration in the literature. This concept, since its inception in the mid-twentieth century, has been an exclusive critique of modern medicine, meaning that branch of medicine based on biomedical paradigm. In this article, we argue that the conceptual shortcoming of this view and the reduction of medicalization to only one medical paradigm, lead to appear medicalization in the new outfit in the name of demedicalization and with more harmful aspects. By focusing on biomedical paradigm or biomedicalization, we neglected other types of medicalization like paramedicalization or CAMization, meaning expansion of Complementary and Alternative Medicine in different aspects of human life. This negligence makes the space to misuse of medicalization for more medicalizing issues. In the following, Iranian Traditional Medicine has been examined as one of the examples of CAM. By presenting historical examples, in the contrast of common understanding of many medical sociologists, we showed that medicalization is not an exclusive concept around modern medicine and its root go back hundreds of year, not just the last hundred year and not only in the western world.