Search

The article examines the concept of medicalisation. Topics covered include how medicalisation has been criticised by some sociologists because of its seeming negativity about medicine and its fading relevance compared to concepts such as biomedicalisation and pharmaceuticalisation, the development of the concept of medicalisation, and the role of medicalisation in late-modern social life and culture.

The authors comment on the article "The Concept of Medicalisation Reassessed," by J. Busfield which appeared in a previous issue. They talk about the contribution of the article to medical sociology, the failure of Busfield to elaborate or articulate upon the different dimensions and directions of medicalization, and issues concerning the merits of pharmaceuticalization.

Objective: To assess the role of Intervention Mapping (IM) in designing disease prevention interventions worldwide. Methods: Systematic search and review of the relevant literature—peer-reviewed and grey—was conducted using the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analysis (PRISMA) guidelines. Findings: Only five of the twenty two included studies reviewed were RCTs that compared intervention using IM protocol with placebo intervention, and provided the outcomes in terms of percentage increase in the uptake of disease-prevention programmes, and only one of the five studies provided an effect measure in the form of relative risk (RR = 1.59, 95% CI = 1.08–2.34, p = 0.02). Of the five RCTs, three were rated as strong evidences, one as a medium evidence and one as a weak evidence, and they all reported statistically significant difference between the two study groups, with disease prevention interventions that have used the intervention mapping approach generally reported significant increases in the uptake of disease-prevention interventions, ranging from 9% to 28.5% (0.0001 ≤ p ≤ 0.02), On the other hand, all the 22 studies have successfully identified the determinants of the uptake of disease prevention interventions that is essential to the success of disease prevention programmes. Conclusion: Intervention Mapping has been successfully used to plan, implement and evaluate interventions that showed significant increase in uptake of disease prevention programmes. This study has provided a good understanding of the role of intervention mapping in designing disease prevention interventions, and a good foundation upon which subsequent reviews can be guided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The looming global antibiotic crisis, and the need to curtail over-use, has been positioned variously as a medical problem, an urgent public health concern, and an issue of governance and political will. But few questions have been raised in terms of its economic drivers. Specifically, how infection management—and the problematic of antimicrobial resistance—may be deeply embedded in economic imperatives and relations of labour. Drawing on interviews with 31 health professionals (doctors, nurses, pharmacists) from a private hospital in Australia, we explore their accounts of the dynamics of care and the economic imperatives in (and beyond) infection management. We argue that market-driven forces create a distinct set of obligations that could undermine the local and global antibiotic optimisation agenda. Given the increasingly privatised landscape of healthcare in Australia and internationally, exploring the nexus of economics and practice will be vital in retaining antibiotics for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Amid persistent interest in and concerns about traditional, complementary and alternative medicine (TCAM) in low-, middle- and high-income countries, the global community of healthcare is in need of learning ways to institutionalize TCAM with biomedicine. By investigating how traditional East Asian medicine (TEAM), one of the most popular forms of TCAM in the world, is institutionalized in China, Korea and Japan, this study finds three different ways of instituting a plural medical system in which TCAM and biomedicine intersect with each other. In the interpenetrative pluralism in China and the exclusionary pluralism in Korea, TEAM and biomedicine are institutionalized as independent and equivalent systems of medical practices. However, TEAM and biomedicine are conditioned to cross over into each other unconditionally in practice in the former, whereas the two exclude each other very strictly in the latter. In the subjugatory pluralism in Japan, the crisscrossing of TEAM and biomedicine is allowed, yet in an asymmetrical way whereby the practice of TEAM is dependent upon and subordinated into biomedicine. The practice of various TEAM modalities is overseen by TEAM doctors, biomedicine doctors or integrative TEAM-biomedicine doctors in interpenetrative pluralism, by TEAM doctors only in exclusionary pluralism, and by biomedicine doctors only in subjugatory pluralism. These varying characteristics demonstrate a variety of plural medical systems. They also provide useful cues in accounting for the varying behaviours of medical service providers and users who encounter TCAM as well as biomedicine in their everyday practices. In addition, the growing literature about the outcomes of TCAM and plural medical systems can take advantage of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The relationship of socioeconomic position with the use of health services may have changed with the emergence of the economic crisis. This study shows that relationship before and during the economic crisis, in Germany and in Spain. Methods: Data from the 2006 and 2011 Socio-Economic Panel carried out in Germany, and from the 2006 and 2011 National Health Surveys carried out in Spain were used. The health services investigated were physician consultations and hospitalization. The measures of socioeconomic position used were education and household income. The magnitude of the relationship between socioeconomic position and the use of each health services was estimated by calculating the percentage ratio by binary regression. Results: In Germany, in both periods, after adjusting for age, sex, type of health insurance and need for care, subjects belonging to the lower educational categories had a lower frequency of physician consultations, while those belonging to the lower income categories had a higher frequency of hospitalization. In the model comparing the two lower socioeconomic categories to the two higher categories, the percentage ratio for physician consultation by education was 0.97 (95%CI 0.96–0.98) in 2006 and 0.96 (95%CI 0.95–0.97) in 2011, and the percentage ratio for hospitalization by income was 1.14 (95%CI 1.05–1.25) in 2006 and 1.12 (95%CI 1.03–1.21) in 2011. In Spain, no significant socioeconomic differences were observed in either period in the frequency of use of these health services in the fully adjusted model. Conclusion: The results suggest that the economic crisis did not alter accessibility to the health system in either country, given that the socioeconomic pattern in the use of these health services was similar before and during the crisis in both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]