“Convinced that only biomedical science can save them, the solutions to the problems of aging appear resolvable by the purchase and consumption of more and more high-cost medical services and technology” (p. Other ways of defining aging and conceptualizing its problems and solutions are muted or are inconceivable.

Medicine today is considered the right (and perhaps the only) tool for managing the problems of aging. 594) for which medical intervention is normalized as necessary and appropriate. The second trend was the growing power of the biomedical model in shaping a national research agenda focused increasingly on basic biological processes and the study of the etiology and treatment of diseases at cellular or subcellular levels.Įstes and Binney also pointed out the influence of the biomedicalization of aging on public opinion, “fostering the tendency to view aging negatively as a process of inevitable decline, disease, and irreversible decay” (p. The first was the way in which aging is constructed as a medical problem or “pathology” and thus is viewed substantially by means of clinical phenomena and the management of clinical problems. That landmark article drew attention to two trends. Binney, the rapid pace of developments in the biomedical sciences and in geriatric medical care continues to shape knowledge about the aged body and expectations about medical intervention in late life. Since the 1989 publication in these pages of “The Biomedicalization of Aging: Dangers and Dilemmas,” by Carroll L. We argue that societal expectations about longevity and standard medical care come together today in a shifting ethics of normalcy, with unexplored sociocultural ramifications.

We explore the intensification of the biomedicalization of old age through a discussion of three features of the new ethical field: (a) the ways in which routine medical care overshadows choice (b) the transformation of the technological imperative to a moral imperative and (c) the coupling of hope with the normalization and routinization of life-extending interventions. This new ethical knowledge is characterized by the difficulty of saying “no” to life-extending interventions, regardless of age. We suggest that a new kind of ethical knowledge is emerging through “routine” clinical care, and we offer examples from the following interventions: cardiac procedures, kidney dialysis, and kidney transplant. and to underscore their emergence in a new ethical field. This essay begins to map new forms of biomedicalization in the U.S.

Developments in the realms of medical innovation and geriatric clinical intervention impact our understanding of the nature of late life, the possibilities for health in advanced age, medical decision making, and family responsibility in ways that could not have been predicted 15 years ago.

Collaborators by Janet Kauffman