Medicalization, clinical diagnosis, and “treat and street” – networks of meaning at stake

Abstract

The present paper examines a discursive network between the medicalization process, the discursive functioning of clinical diagnoses in the contemporary world, and a specific functioning of medical practice grounded on a “treat and street” type of care. By developing a discursive analysis, the authors track the history of the word “diagnosis” in an analytical movement that reexamines its conditions of production and functioning at present, making the effects of medicalization explicit. The study addresses “treat and street” care, in which the position-subject physician inserts him/ herself in a production condition so that the drug takes the authorship role in the relationship between physicians and patients, as a consequence of the functioning of diagnosis. This diagnosis functioning in clinical practice implies a silencing of the social and political bond assumed in this practice, which allows the establishment of drugs as a setting of enunciation of the procedures oriented toward care to patients.