Over the last twenty years, type 2 diabetes skyrocketed to the forefront of global public health concern. In this book, Mari Armstrong-Hough examines the rise in and response to the disease in two societies: the United States and Japan. Both societies have faced rising rates of diabetes, but their social and biomedical responses to its ascendance have diverged. To explain the emergence of these distinctive strategies, Armstrong-Hough argues that physicians act not only on increasingly globalized professional standards but also on local knowledge, explanatory models, and cultural toolkits. As a result, strategies for clinical management diverge sharply from one country to another. Armstrong-Hough demonstrates how distinctive practices endure in the midst of intensifying biomedicalization, both on the part of patients and on the part of physicians, and how these differences grow from broader cultural narratives about diabetes in each setting.

An Anthropology of Biomedicine is an exciting new introduction to biomedicine and its global implications. Focusing on the ways in which the application of biomedical technologies bring about radical changes to societies at large, cultural anthropologist Margaret Lock and her co-author physician and medical anthropologist Vinh-Kim Nguyen develop and integrate the thesis that the human body in health and illness is the elusive product of nature and culture that refuses to be pinned down. Introduces biomedicine from an anthropological perspective, exploring the entanglement of material bodies with history, environment, culture, and politics Develops and integrates an original theory: that the human body in health and illness is not an ontological given but a moveable, malleable entity Makes extensive use of historical and contemporary ethnographic materials around the globe to illustrate the importance of this methodological approach Integrates key new research data with more classical material, covering the management of epidemics, famines, fertility and birth, by military doctors from colonial times on Uses numerous case studies to illustrate concepts such as the global commodification of human bodies and body parts, modern forms of population, and the extension of biomedical technologies into domestic and intimate domains Winner of the 2010 Prose Award for Archaeology and Anthropology

In recent years medicalization, the process of making something medical, has gained considerable ground and a position in everyday discourse. In this multidisciplinary collection of original essays, the authors expertly consider how issues around medicalization have developed, ways in which it is changing, and the potential shapes it will take in the future. They develop a unique argument that medicalization, biomedicalization, pharmaceuticalization and geneticization are related and co-evolving processes, present throughout the globe. This is an ideal addition to anthropology, sociology and STS courses about medicine and health.

The Open Access version of this book, available at https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781351234146, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. This book analyses the social and ethical implications of the globalization of emerging skin-whitening and anti-ageing biotechnology. Using an intersectional theoretical framework and a content analysis methodology drawn from cultural studies, the sociology of knowledge, the history of colonial medicine and critical race theory, it examines technical reports, as well as print and online advertisements from pharmaceutical and cosmetics companies for skin-whitening products. With close attention to the promises of ‘ageless beauty’, ‘brightened’, youthful skin and solutions to ‘pigmentation problems’ for non-white women, the author reveals the dynamics of racialization and biomedicalization at work. A study of a significant sector of the globalized health and wellness industries – which requires the active participation of consumers in the biomedicalization of their own bodies – Wellness in Whiteness will appeal to social scientists with interests in gender, race and ethnicity, biotechnology and embodiment.

This collection of essays brings together leading scholars from cultural anthropology, history, sociology and science studies to conduct a critical dialogue on the culture(s) of biomedical practice, discussing its material, epistemic and social implications.

Biomedicalization is seen as the natural outgrowth of continued scientific progress--a movement towards improving the quality and quantity of life through scientific inquiries using biomedical perspectives and methods. This approach carries with it the assumption that with "proper" risk assessment, detection, and treatment, our lives can be lengthened, improved, and indeed more fulfilling. Yet critics question biomedicalization's ability to deliver. There is concern about how biomedicalization can change our traditional concepts of health as we discover more conditions for which we are at risk, and health maintenance is seen as the responsibility of the individual. The purpose of the book is to describe, assess, and critique biomedicalization and its influence as a larger social trend on the health field and specifically in the area of alcohol research, policy, and programs. Chapter 1 gives a broad overview of biomedicalization. Chapter 2 lays the groundwork for a historical understanding of how medicalization and biomeidcalization have developed and are expressed in diverse fields such as aging, psychiatry/mental health, and women's health. Chapter 3 focuses in-depth on alcoholism and assesses the development and assumptions underlying the two movements that have greatly influenced the substance abuse field: the medicalization of deviance and the growth of the disease model of alcoholism. Chapter 4 discusses the origins and development of the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (NIAAA) from its inception in 1970. Chapter 5 illustrates the growing biomedicalization that has occurred in the alcohol field prior to NIAAA's movement to the National Institute of Health (NIH). Chapter 6 assesses how Sweden has handled alcohol problems and currently funds alcohol research. Chapter 7 concludes with a rationale for an expanded discourse between social scientists and biomedical researchers working on social problems, particularly alcohol issues. This volume will stimulate discussion of the processes by which social problems, and specifically alcohol issues, are framed, managed, and studied. It will hold particular interest for researchers and students in the areas of alcohol studies, social science, and social welfare. Lorraine Midanik is a professor in the School of Social Welfare, University of California, Berkeley.

The rise of Western scientific medicine fully established the medical sector of the U.S. political economy by the end of the Second World War, the first “social transformation of American medicine.” Then, in an ongoing process called medicalization, the jurisdiction of medicine began expanding, redefining certain areas once deemed moral, social, or legal problems (such as alcoholism, drug addiction, and obesity) as medical problems. The editors of this important collection argue that since the mid-1980s, dramatic, and especially technoscientific, changes in the constitution, organization, and practices of contemporary biomedicine have coalesced into biomedicalization, the second major transformation of American medicine. This volume offers in-depth analyses and case studies along with the groundbreaking essay in which the editors first elaborated their theory of biomedicalization. Contributors. Natalie Boero, Adele E. Clarke, Jennifer R. Fishman, Jennifer Ruth Fosket, Kelly Joyce, Jonathan Kahn, Laura Mamo, Jackie Orr, Elianne Riska, Janet K. Shim, Sara Shostak