Rethinking Pharmaceuticalisation from the View of Japanese Context

Medicalisation is a key concept in medical sociology, and is useful tool to capture social control by medical profession. Recently, however, scholars increasingly are focusing on the pharmaceuticals aspects of medicalization. Pharmaceuticalisation is defined as ‘the process by which social, behavioural or bodily conditions are treated or deemed to be in need of treatment, with medical drugs by doctors or patients’ (Abraham 2010). In recent years, although the concept of pharmaceuticalisation have been pervasive in some journals, the concept is still primarily a topic explored in scholarly terms. Indeed, according to Bell and Figert (2012), as of June 17, 2011, there were only seven thousands hits for “pharmaceuticalisation” in Google, and only seven for the topic of “pharmaceuticalisation” in Web of Science. However, there is a need for the concept of pharmaceuticalisation, because the empirical phenomena, which medicalization theory cannot adequately capture or explain, are increasing. Though discussion of the concept is increasingly developing in the Western society, the discussion in Japan is still scarce. Therefore, in this report, by considering the reason for lack of the discussion in Japan, I aim to reconsider the concept of pharmaceuticalisation critically, and to explore the availability of the concept. One of the factors that pharmaceuticalisation is not general in Japan is universal health insurance system. Japanese people can receive the same medical care at anytime and anywhere by universal health insurance system. Therefore, we cannot imagine the impact of pharmaceuticals is greater for Japanese people. That is, generalising pharmaceuticalisation without the point of social system would be hard. However, given that a lot of Japanese people use dietary supplements, pharmaceuticalisation might be affect individual healthicisation. Therefore, by using pharmaceuticalisation that is associated with individual healthicisation and social system, it might be available to analyse social phenomena of pharmaceuticals better.