Abstract
The expansion of the influence of medicine on social demands and moral issues has been the subject of intense discussions, but many experts claim that the analysis has lost rigor. By this essay, we recover the deeper senses of the term medicalization and discuss two interrelated assumptions: if public policies with a positive impact on the population health levels would meet a demedicalizing role and if the deepening of democracy could be considered an essential condition to face the medicalizing processes. We summarize core concepts related to the main driving forces of medicalization processes and also changes associated with increased control over nature transforming life as we know it, highlighting the advance of capitalist economic order on other spheres as the state and the community. We argue that any long-range demedicalizing perspective would depend at least two hypotheses interrelated, corresponding to the model that guides the response to health needs, and the strength of democracy in its double meaning, either as a politics category able to put the majority sectors of society at the heart of state decisions, either as an economic category able to change the economic effects of capitalism in the state-society relations.
medicalization; public health; public policy