Abstract

Is the medicalization of poverty a rational and humane response to an intractable problem, or just the latest in a long series of ineffective and costly attempts to address the problem? Considerable ink has been spilled on the dispute, with each side marshalling heart-rending anecdotes to help make their case — along with the obligatory statistics and regression analyses. Rather than add more verbiage to that dispute, this article sketches out a framework for understanding the phenomenon of medicalization, along with a description of the demand-side and supply-side factors that have brought us to this pass.