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In the wellness
movement, the concept of medicalization is attributed to Ivan Illich
who was, also, one of the first to advocate patient
empowerment. He was one of the movements greatest free thinkers who
was born September 4, 1926 in Vienna and died December 2, 2002 of
cancer at the age of 76 in Bremen, Germany.
Illich was a multilingual prolific writer who focused on
the major institutions of the industrialized world. He applied a "model
of social assessment of technological progress" to one of these
institutions in each of his books in order to expose their current
state of counterproductivity. His most celebrated work is generally
considered to be Deschooling Society, a critical discourse on education.
Illich's rhetoric is often described as polemic or
rhetorically intoxicating. As a gifted linguist, Illich likes to play
with words. As a nonconformist, Illich often uses words outside of
their normal context and generally accepted meanings. And, unless you
read Illich while you are in the correct frame of mind, you will find
his writing to be just wordy, flowery rants that are generally hard to
follow.
Looking at his mission, Illich considers "self-reliance,
autonomy, and dignity for all, particularly the weaker"[5] to be
the highest good. Illich advocates that "individual freedom [is]
realized in personal independence."[5] He laments industrialized
societies where ever-increasing production, consumption and profit are
used to measure the quality of human life. In all of his books, Illich
calls for people to rediscover the lost art of living. His universal
theme is the "counterproductivity of overindustrialized
civilization."[5] To Illich, in order for man to live creatively,
man must reassert his autonomy and take control of his environment.
From his point of view, society created the institutions in order to
serve the society. But, according to Illich, these institutions have
all become counterproductive to their original intent because they now
exist to benefit themselves rather than the betterment of society.
Health care is merely one of many institutions that Illich has written
about.
Illich's classic criticism of Western medicine is called
Medical Nemesis and was first published in 1976. A second edition was
later issued as Limits to Medicine in 1995. In Medical Nemesis Illich
applies a formulaic "model of social assessment of technological
progress ... to the criticism of the professional monopoly and of the
scientism in health care."[5]
In Medical Nemesis , Illich challenged the fundamental
premise of medical progress, arguing that institutional medicine is
overwhelmingly pathogenic and actively sickening.
Health, argues Illich, is the capacity to cope with the
human reality of death, pain, and sickness. Technology can help, but
modern medicine has gone too far launching into a god like battle to
eradicate death, pain, and sickness. In doing so, it turns people into
consumers or objects, destroying their capacity for health.
The concept of medicalization is attributed to Ivan
Illich, who first wrote on the subject in 1976. He proposed that modern
medicine had become detrimental to society, by amongst other things, "launching
... an inhuman attempt to defeat death, pain and sickness".[5] By
doing so, he argued, medicine had deprived individuals and societies of
their ability to cope with sickness and death.
According to Illich, "iatrogenesis cannot be
understood unless it is seen as the specifically medicial manifestation
of specific counterproductivitiy." Illich sees three levels of
iatrogenesis. Clinical iatrogenesis is the injury done to patients by
ineffective, toxic, and unsafe treatments. Social iatrogenesis results
from the medicalisation of life. Cultural iatrogenesis is the
destruction of traditional ways of dealing with and making sense of
death, pain, and sickness.
Evidence-based medicine is described in these pages 20
years before the term was coined. The explosion in ever escalating
health care costs is both predicted and explained. Popular opinion
wrongly credits medical science with the control of disease, when in
fact the general decrease in morbidity and mortality are in fact the
result of better standards of living. Further he claims, along with Weil,
that awe-inspiring medical technology has combined with egalitarian
rhetoric to create the impression that contemporary medicine is highly
effective.
Book Written by Ivan Illich
- Education (Deschooling Society, 1971)
- Energy, Transport and Economic Development (Energy
And Equity, 1974)
- Historicity of Materials (H2O And The Waters of
Forgetfulness, 1985),
- Literacy
- (ABC, The Alphabetisation Of The Popular Mind,
1988, co-written with Barry Sanders)
- (In The Vineyard Of The Text, 1993)
- Medicine (Medical Nemesis, 1976)
- Technological Development (Tools For Conviviality,
1973)
- Work
- (The Right To Useful Unemployment And Its
Professional Enemies, 1978)
- (Shadow Work, 1981)
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