The concept of medicalisation reassessed: a response to Joan Busfield

Joan Busfield's (2017) reassessment of the concept of medicalisation is a welcome and timely contribution to a key issue within medical sociology, past and present. Not simply medical sociology however. Medicalisation indeed, as Conrad (2015) himself notes, now carries ‘analytical weight’ in a range of disciplines beyond sociology including history, anthropology, bioethics, economics, media studies and feminism. To this of course we may add engagements within medicine itself as well as the wider circulation of ‘medicalisation’ within popular culture, if not public consciousness today, as a commonly used if not abused term of reference, thereby rending medicalisation a victim of its own success perhaps. Hence debates in recent years as to whether or not medicalisation has outlived its usefulness as a concept, including its relationship to other newly developed concepts and ways of theorising these matters, in sociology and beyond (Bell and Figert 2014, 2015, Rose 2007).