(originally posted to Technoscience as if People Mattered January 14, 2015) Disparities in health outcomes along racial, gender, and class lines are increasingly prevalent, and we don’t have to search for long to find media coverage of the spiraling costs of health care. Understanding medicine as a social phenomenon is thus now more important than ever. The book Biomedicalization: Technoscience, Health, and Illness attests to the increasing universality of the application of medical thinking to “normal” life, saying, “health itself and proper management of chronic illnesses are becoming individual moral responsibilities to be fulfilled through improved access to knowledge, self-surveillance, prevention, risk, assessment, the treatment of risk, and the consumption of appropriate self-help and biomedical goods and services.” There are two concepts, medicalization and biomedicalization,