Medicalisation of Childbirth

The image of medicalisation Originally, the concept of medicalisation was strongly associated with medical dominance, involving the extension of medicines jurisdiction over erstwhile normal life events and experiences. more(prenominal) recently, however, this view of a docile lay populace, in thrall to expansionist medicine, has been challenged. Thus, as we enter a post-modern era, with increased concerns over risk and a fall off in the trust of expert authority, some(a)(prenominal) sociologists plead that the modern day consumer of healthcare plays an active eccentric in bringing about or resisting medicalisation.Such participation, however, give the sack be problematic as healthcare consumers bring about increasingly aware of the risks and uncertainty surrounding many medical choices. The emergence of the modern day consumer non only raises questions about the notion of medicalisation as a uni-dimensional concept, but also requires stipulation of the specific genial con texts in which medicalisation occurs. In this paper, we describe how the concept of medicalisation is presented in the literature, outlining different accounts of agency that shape the march.We suggest that some earlier accounts of medicalisation over-emphasized the medical professions imperialistic tendencies and often underplayed the benefits of medicine. With consideration of the social context in which medicalisation, or its converse, arises, we argue that medicalisation is a much more complex, ambiguous, and contested process than the medicalisation thesis of the 1970s implied.In particular, as we enter a post-modern era, conceptualizing medicalisation as a uni-dimensional, uniform process or as the result of medical dominance alone(predicate) is clearly insufficient. Indeed, if, as Conrad and Schneider (1992) suggested, medicalisation was linked to the rise of freethinking and science (ie to modernity), and if we are experiencing the passing of modernity, we might gestate to see a decrease in medicalisation