DEMEDICALIZATION AS A LINE OF CONVERGENCE FOR VARIOUS MEDICAL SYSTEMS

Abstract

The purpose of the article is to reveal demedicalization as a field of tasks that, if solved, make possible integration of various medical systems. The article discusses two ways of understanding the term "medicalization". According to the first one, it refers to the process when "non-medical problems become medical"; according to the second one, it is the process of growth of the number of risks and procedures to minimize them, with its medical nature not causing a controversy. Thanks to the development of new biomedical technologies, the number of medical interventions recommended for a person is radically increasing. Accordingly, the time spent on identifying and minimizing medical risks increases as well. In the international biomedical community, the idea of ​​quaternary prevention is spreading as a conventional practice that allows reducing the pressure of various means of determining medical risks and, accordingly, the patient's anxiety. This demedicalization practice seems a suitable line of convergence between different medical systems since it offers minimal convergence of their epistemological foundations. Among them is the recognition of the patient's anxiety not as a diagnosis but as an important social problem; a practice from any medical system can be utilized to solve it.