Has global health become medicalised?

Many people have heard of ‘global health’. In fact, it is hard to get away from it, particularly on the medical side of college campuses, in health policy discussions, or the media when a newsworthy epidemic breaks out somewhere. Global health is generally code for (unfair) health disparities and the unhappy tendency of health crises walk or fly across national borders. Perhaps less familiar is the concept of ‘medicalization’. Roughly speaking, it is the process by which human problems are understood as (or ‘reduced to’) medical problems. For example, one could view diabetes as a purely medical problem, for which better treatments are needed, rather than (say) a condition implicating a host of social, political and economic factors, such as the low-cost of processed food, changes in work conditions and the structure of built environments. So what happens when you put ‘global health’ and ‘medicalization’ together?

Jocalyn Clark has written some intriguing exploratory pieces on the links between medicalization and global health in the online journal Global Health Action. Do global health initiatives tend to medicalize the problems that they set out to tackle? And if so, what effects does this process of medicalization then have? Certainly there is a tendency to seek technological (‘innovative’) solutions to health problems in developing countries, often with mixed results. To the extent that the determinants of poor and better health are social, political and economic, purely medical interventions are likely to have superficial impact. I wonder if there is also something else at play: not just medicalization, but the allure of objectivity and neutrality – think Red Cross -- associated with Western medicine. Coming into a developing country with medical interventions seems far less politically fraught than proposing large-scale changes to ways of life. So there is a tension between a major tenet of global health (that health is socially determined) and the political implications of trying to improve health globally. The tendency towards medicalization may paradoxically reflect a need to look for a ‘safe space’ for global health practice.