Awakened Sleep Disorder—Medicalization of Sleep Disorder in Taiwan
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Yu, Hsiao-Hui
Abstract
Sleep is used to be an innate ability of human beings. From the rise and fall of the dominance of local medicine and western medicine, to the newborn medical specialty “sleep medicine”, medicine has now turned sleep a state examined and treated by medical system. How does the medical system arise our attention of sleep disorder? How does the birth of a clinical specialty relate to our society? Instead of seeing medical development as the solution to health-related problems altogether, this thesis aims to highlight the social construction of disease or disorder by medicine. To reach this goal, I employed in-depth interview and literature review. By interviewing doctors involved in sleep medicine (like chronologists, physiatrists, neurologists and otolaryngologists), doctors from non-western medical system, and people who seek treatment of insomnia or obstructive sleep apnea(OSA), I tried to present the actions of different actors involved in the medicalization of sleep disorder in this in-depth report. Sleep medicine is a newly-shaped medical specialty treating all sleep disorders ranging from common insomnia to new disease OSA. It also arises attention to links between public safety and sleep disorder. From the scope of medicalization, sleep examination is utilized to define normalcy and abnormalcy, turning sleep abnormalcy as problems necessary for medical system to diagnose and treat. This development is a series of actions mobilized by doctors, medical application suppliers and sleep organization. These actors also help build the professional status of sleep medicine. Moreover, the change of local health insurance plays a key role in the medicalizaion of sleep disorder. Under the restriction of coverage of medical treatment, sleep seems to gradually become commodities that medical system is eager to provide. This can be observed from the fast-growing numbers of hospitals involving in sleep medicine, and escalating hospitals, private health screening centers and clinics all work hard to increase services which are not covered by health insurance. As sleep disorder gradually steps into the process of medicaliztion, medical seekers react in different ways. From their experiences, we can see some of them comply with medical advice and thus alleviate their pain or solve their problem, and thus medicalization of sleep disorder do help explain their physical ill-feeling, clarify mechanism of disease and provide remedies. But every unique and active medical seeker has different response. Some of them take alternative medical treatment such as Chinese medicine and alternative medicine, since the common and prevailing way might not meet their needs. In addition, some choose to voice out their dissatisfactory experience of medical-seeking or refuse to be defined as “patients.” According to these medical-seeking experiences, we can see the presentation of medicalization is of various types. It has gains and losses, not an either-or situation.
Subjects
Sleep medicine
sleep clinic
sleep examination
medicalization
medical professionalization
medical commodification
medical-seeking
SDGs
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