You ever fought a war for so long that you can't even imagine what the end would look like? This book is something like that. Peter Conrad was one of the first scholars to study medicalization, starting in the 1970s with ADHD. This book builds on his more than three decades of research in the field, and the detailed sources are by far its strongest accomplishment. However, Conrad has lost the distance necessary to take a neutral look at the complex phenomena he describes.

Medicalization is the process by which something becomes defined as a medical problem, rather than a social, criminal, or moral failure, or simply a delusion. As such, it is entirely about the definition and boundaries of illness, and the responsibilities for health allocated to doctors, patients, insurance companies, and pharmaceutical researchers. From Conrad's perspective, medicalization has advanced on all fronts, claiming new territory. The problem with medicalization is that it reduces the diversity of human existence to "normal" and a series of pathologies, and that it is being carried out by pharmaceutical companies which stand to benefit from new diseases and drugs.

I don't disagree with these complaints, but if medicalization is really a question about definitions, responsibility, and values, then we need to step back and examine the ways in which diseases are defined, the consequences of holding various stakeholders responsible, and what our values truly are. Medicalization is a symptom of our desire to control our own destines--medical interventions are widely believed to be effective--not a problem to be fixed.