Abstract
Medicalization is the process by which nonmedical problems become defined and treated as medical problems often requiring medical treatment. The term medicalization first appeared in the sociology literature and focused on deviance, but it soon expanded to examine other human conditions. This article focuses on sociological and anthropological perspectives on the expansion of medicalization. This includes a review of the characteristics, origins, and consequences of medicalization, with sociology's emphasis on the emergence of medical categories and anthropology's emphasis on biomedicine's institutional power and cultural authority. Medicalization has numerous social consequences, including the pathologization of human differences and individualization of human problems while minimizing social and political context.