Life medicalization and the recent appearance of "pharmaceuticalization"

Medicalization is a concern to which we have been paying attention intermittently for the past half century. However, it is increasingly  difficult to look away from its multiple and ubiquitous manifestations, and  therefore there is an increasingly higher number of analysis and studies about  them, from the most varied perspectives, not only by healthcare literature, but also with the great contribution by social sciences such as Anthropology or  Sociology.Based on previous publications, this article offers an updated review on life  medicalization in the European setting, highlighting particularly those situations  where a medication is the main vehicle for medicalization. This demands a  careful exploration of the "pharmaceuticalization" concept, which appeared in  the past decade, and which many of the research projects with these  characteristics intend to embrace.The decentralized nature of the decisions on diagnosis and treatment requires an agreement of healthcare professionals on the presumed benefits of certain  therapeutic interventions as key factor to the expansion of medicalization. Even  so, there are multiple interactions and synergies between incentives and  economic interests in the medicalization process, as well as bias in the  generation of knowledge, the training for professionals, their need to cope with  patient expectations, progressively overcoming their resolution capacities, and  the mechanisms for structuring said expectations. A better understanding of the  dispositifs that promote medicalization (the strategy without a strategist that  becomes visible through its cumulative outcome, but is less clearly seen by the  different agents, sometimes contradictory, working through it) is essential in  order to limit its most undesirable expansions.