The Shifting Borders of Medicalization: Perspectives and Dilemmas of Human Enhancement

While medicalization is the process of extending the medical gaze on human conditions through the mechanism of pathologization, human enhancement actions are implemented towards normal conditions. In this sense, human enhancement can not be considered either health care or health promotion because its aim is optimization, not healing nor prevention. As the borders between normality and pathology are blurred, biomedical interventions aiming at improving a normal individual today could be conceived as health care practices directed towards a sick person tomorrow. Therefore, human enhancement actions should be analyzed through the lenses of the medicalization-theory proposed by Conrad – but on a long-term scale. Under an ethical perspective, human enhancement interventions – being very heterogeneous – should be analyzed case-by-case.