Using Drugs to Contest Medicalization?: Making Medical Knowledge on the Internet

• In Event: Drug Dealing Markets, Networks, and the Internet

Abstract

Can medicalization be used against institutional medicine? Early medicalization studies were primarily concerned with medicine acting as a vehicle of social control. More recently, the ‘shifting engines of medicalization’ and increased patient dependence on Internet health information has drawn attention to individuals’ usage of bottom up medicalization to resist top down medicalization. I extend this ‘contested medicalization’ framework in a qualitative analysis of discourse on drug discussion websites. I find that forum members not only resist medical frames that treat addiction and drug use as a disease, but also medicalize certain drugs as potentially curative and certain drug related conditions as treatable. My findings show that medicalization can be used against institutional medicine through bottom up processes that legitimate deviant activities. Given the rising prominence of health information seeking on the Internet, this medicalization may also be employed by other stigmatized virtual communities.

Author

• Scott W. Duxbury, The Ohio State University