Treatment as Palimpsest. When medicalization becomes a Politically Correct Critic

Abstract

Several revisions and reformulations of medicalization notion showed it as a multiple and complex process, with particular characteristics according to gender, ages, ethnic identities, social classes, and the geopolitical role of the target populations. Based on the analysis of the relationships between treatment (bio-scientific / psychiatric-psychological) and the mode to treat (trato) in contexts of crisis, the objective of this article is to exam several dimensions of the medicalization process in countries outside the euro-american arch. Taking as a point of departure Ulloa's notion of way to treat (trato), the analysis of the processes of submitting "new" problems under expert health system, shows that "new" treatments are montages of diverse ways to treat, expert and lay knowledge and practices. The notion of palimpsest allows us to modelize these treatments as montages among heterogeneous fragments, engendered by different truth-authority regimes, genealogies and chronologies. Finally, this approach based on the palimpsest model, questions the lineality, homogeneity and universality enclosed in the notion of medicalization, as well as its critical status.