This is from Thinking About Medicine – An Introduction to the Philosophy of Healthcare, by David Misselbrook:
BUT IS MEDICALISATION A GENUINE PROBLEM?
Medicalisation is bad medicine for two reasons. Firstly it is ontologically unsound; it commits a category error by identifying slices of normality as pathology. Secondly by labelling normal human problems as medical problems we take them out of the hands of the individual and make false promises that we will solve such problems. One could see this as the WHO definition of health in action; creating “… a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being” is now the job of the clinician. To quote Freymann’s ironic definition, “a well person is a patient who has not been completely worked up”. Ivan Illich, 1926-2002, forcefully made this point by arguing that “the medical establishment has become a major threat to health”. He was not claiming that medicine is of no value in correcting pathology. He was arguing that the biomedical model, when followed by its inevitable consequence of medicalisation, leads to many more people being seen as unhealthy.