Healthism

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As healthism (roughly corresponds to the term Health delusion ) is defined as an exaggerated, irrational and ideologically colored concern for the health of an individual or a population. The term was first used by R. Crawford , who in an article in 1980 described an expansion of the concept of health to all areas of life and thus an overvalue of health thinking.

The term was picked up by the toxicologist, epidemiologist and medical critic Petr Skrabanek , author of the book Follies and Fallacies in Medicine . Skrabanek left the Czechoslovak Republic after the failed Prague Spring in 1968 and worked in the 1970s in the field of neuropeptides , which he co-founded through his research on substance P [1]. In 1994, the year he died, he published the work The Death of Humane Medicine and the Rise of Coercive Healthism ( Death of Human Medicine and Rise of Obligation to Health). In it he describes a "health ideology" which radically regulates the health behavior of citizens. In the first part of his work he defines and criticizes “healthism” ( “when health is not just a personal yearning but is part of state ideology” ) as a social problem and part of a state ideology. James Le Fanu defined the term in 2000 as a kind of behavioral disorder of mentally unstable people, also translatable as health hysteria. It has been described by le Fanu as a medicine-inspired obsession with ridiculous or non-existent threats to health.

See also

literature

  • R. Crawford: Healthism and the Medicalization of Everyday Life. In: Internat. Journal of Health Services. 10 (3), 1980, pp. 365-388.
  • Petr Skrabanek: The Death of Humane Medicine and the Rise of Coercive Healthism. St Edmundsbury Press Dublin 1994, ISBN 0-907631-59-2 .
  • Clare Dyer: Tobacco Company Set Up Network of Sympathetic Scientists. In: British Medical Journal. 316, 1998, p. 1553
  • James Le Fanu: The Rise and Fall of Modern Medicine. Carroll & Graf, New York 2000, ISBN 0349112800 .

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