Medicalisation of Childbirth

The concept of medical examisation Originally, the concept of medicalisation was strongly associated with medical dominance, involving the extension of medicines jurisdiction over erstwhile normal life events and experiences. to a greater extent recently, however, this view of a docile lay populace, in thrall to expansionist medicine, has been challenged. Thus, as we infix a post- neo era, with increased concerns over risk and a decline in the trust of expert authority, many sociologists argue that the modern day consumer of healthcare plays an active role in bringing round or resisting medicalisation.Such participation, however, can be problematic as healthcare consumers locomote increasingly aware of the risks and uncertainty surrounding many medical choices. The takings of the modern day consumer not only raises questions about the notion of medicalisation as a uni-dimensional concept, but also requires shape of the specific social contexts in which medicalisation occurs. In this paper, we describe how the concept of medicalisation is presented in the literature, outlining different accounts of agency that crop the process.We suggest that some earlier accounts of medicalisation over-emphasized the medical professions imperialistic tendencies and often underplayed the benefits of medicine. With consideration of the social context in which medicalisation, or its converse, arises, we argue that medicalisation is a often more complex, ambiguous, and contested process than the medicalisation thesis of the 1970s implied.In particular, as we enter a post-modern era, conceptualizing medicalisation as a uni-dimensional, uniform process or as the result of medical dominance alone is clearly insufficient. Indeed, if, as Conrad and Schneider (1992) suggested, medicalisation was linked to the rise of rationalism and science (ie to modernity), and if we are experiencing the passing of modernity, we might conceive to see a decrease in medicalisation