MEDICINE, POWER, AND SOCIAL CONTROL IN MODERN SOCIETY

Abstract

Medicine has always been considered a field of study that is aimed at disease prevention and ensuring the common good. However, in modern society, its functions have expanded beyond therapeutic ones and become caught up in the machineries of political, economic, and social power. This research explores medicine as a social control institution through the sociological lenses, addressing such processes as medicalization, normalization, and health commodification processes. The qualitative documentary approach was utilized, and it included an integrated review and thematic analysis of the current scholarly literature on medical sociology, public health, and social theory published in the period between 2020 and 2025. The results show that medicalization expands the medical power into daily life when the social and behavioural states are redefined as medical problems that need professional treatment. Moreover, healthcare commodification supports access disparities, i.e., benefiting wealthy groups and disadvantaging vulnerable groups. According to the Foucaultian approach, medicine is a biopower process that is governed by state regulation, policies of public health, and practices of surveillance that can be imposed on populations. Moreover, social determinants of health show the role of structural inequalities in access to care and health outcomes. The research finds that medicine is both a therapeutic process and a social control system. Although it has played a role in the enhanced health outcomes, its incorporation in capitalist economies and institutional power regimes has turned health into a market product at the expense of accepting it as a basic human right. Health is a fundamental right that should be reinstated in a bid to ensure that healthcare systems are equitable and socially responsible.