Are we over-diagnosed and over-medicated?

We are constantly bombarded with displays of medications and advertising in our everyday lives. Supermarket aisles are stocked with medications, we walk past pharmacies every day, advertisements appear on the Internet

A better life beckons if we take this pill. And there is an ever expanding array of conditions which, we are told, can be improved if you just follow the prescription.

Chronic and life threatening conditions are of course a target for the drug companies selling their products in pursuit of profit, but also increasingly a range of other behaviours and symptoms that were not previously medicalised are coming under the purview of the drug peddlers – including our emotional state, our self-control and our sexual performances.

In sociology the issue of medicalisation, a process where more and more conditions, situations and experiences are responded to with medical solutions, usually pharmaceuticals, has been of interest for decades. And there is some substance to concerns about this process. To take one example, the prescribing of Zopiclone, an hypnotic drug used to improve sleep, increased by 300% over a ten-year period in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Unfortunately Zopiclone, like most drugs, can cause side effects, and with and increasing number of people using different drugs at the same time to treat multiple conditions, the potential damaging effects of over-prescribing are multiplied.

A further problem here is that we are not very good at recording side effects from the medications we are prescribed.

Research by Professor Kevin Dew and his colleagues has shown that when patients raise concerns about side effects to their GP, they do so in a very vague way. There is a reason for this. Patients are being polite. They do not want to challenge the GP, who did the prescribing. This tentative way of raising concerns about medications provides a partial explanation for why side effects are massively underreported.

Kevin Dew and his colleagues have also shown how the reporting of side effects can be greatly enhanced if people know that they can report their concerns straight to the drug monitoring agencies and so not have to go through their GP,

For more information on the sociology of health please take a look at Kevin Dew's publications and research interests