BMJ 2002;324:905-907 ( 13 April )

Education and debate

Between hope and acceptance: the medicalisation of dying

David Clark, professor of medical sociology. 

Academic Palliative Medicine Unit, University of Sheffield, Trent Palliative Care Centre, Sykes House, Sheffield S11 9NE

d.clark@sheffield.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

Palliative care has encouraged medicine to be gentler in its acceptance of death, yet medical services in general continue to regard death as something to be resisted, postponed, or avoided. David Hart examines the challenge facing doctors to balance technical intervention with a humanistic approach to their dying patients

We have grown used to speaking of medicalisation as a byword for all things negative about the influence of modern medicine on life and society. The term has become synonymous with the sense of a profession reaching too far: into the body, the mind, and even the soul itself. Its use is now almost always pejorative, negative, and antagonistic. When Ivan Illich developed his original critique of medicalisation in the mid-1970s, he highlighted its particular impact upon the dying process in modern culture and could claim that modern medicine had "brought the epoch of natural death to an end" (box 1. . . [Full text of this article]
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