Paramedicalization

Paramedicalization refers to the trend of people setting more and more value on alternative medicine and different beliefs about wealth and health, which are not authorized by medical science. The process runs concurrently with medicalization.

Traditional or alternative medicines (especially spiritualistic therapies) reach an ever greater scale of human activities - even to the time beyond birth and death. In that sense medicalization has much stricter borders.

The concept of paramedicalization was first presented in 1995 by Finnish sociologists in the Finnish Journal of social medicine (Raimo Tuomainen et al.: [http://www.raimotuomainen.fi/paramedikalisaatio.htm Paramedikalisaatio - terveystyötä lääketieteen katveessa. Sosiaalilääketieteellinen aikakauslehti 1995:3:217-223] ; with an English abstract).