This critique will examine the view that medicine is a form of social control. There are many theorists that have different opinions on this view. This critique will discuss each one and their different views.

Parsons (1951) argued that the social control and regulation of sickness were essential because any society needed to maintain balance and achieve its general goals. Too great a burden of sickness threatened social order. The sick role regulated patients conduct while sick and created a set of conditions governing entry to and exit from the role. There were four component parts:

* The sick person is exempted from responsibility for their sickness; they are regarded as being unable to get better without professional help.

* The sick person can legitimately withdraw from normal activities and social responsibilities, such as employment, housework and family duties into sick role.

* The sick person is under social obligation to get better quickly. This is the main justification for creating the sick role (Jones 1994).

By no means do all patients move into the sick role, yet Parsons assumed the interpretative way and pathway to the doctors had been satisfactorily undertaken. Parsons analysis of the patients role therefore tends to be rather a narrow slice of the total character of illness behaviour and help - seeking behaviour (Turner, 1987).

Medical power is the health work system and the fundamental relationship arising out of industrial capitalism produces the very nature of health and illness. Doyals (1979) commented that the emphasis on curative medical intervention rather than broadly based preventive measures serves the interest of capitalism by disguising how ill people is socially produced. In the USA, it has been claimed that, while the role of medical power is repressive, doctors have little real autonomy. Their position as professionals has been increasingly eroded with the growth of the medical industrial complex. Health has been made into just another product for sale (McKinlay, 1984).

Navarro (1979) argued that doctors act as servants of the capitalist state by ensuring that health and illness are conceptualised in individual terms. They emphasis diet, lifestyle and exercise rather than the part played by industrial process and capitalist production. They regulate sickness and contribute towards the productivity of capitalism by treating and returning workers to the workforce. Narvarro (1979) also suggested that the NHS in Britain consolidated medical power in health work, with the result that doctors as a dominant group supported a version of health care which focused on upper class and professional groups at the expense of working class health. The medical model reinforces the notion of health as a commodity and conceptualises illness as an individual responsibility. In Britain the health, work system has expanded in recent years the cost of maintaining it has risen and the numbers taking sick leave or undergoing hospital treatment have grown significantly. This suggests that doctors have raised the cost for capital and increases rather than reduced sickness (Hart, 1985). The notion of doctors as the agents of capital sits, uneasily with the evidence of their power to influence popular thinking about health and illness and to direct resources into health work. Successive attempts to control spending and restrict medical power by expanding managerial control have yet failed to work.

The discipline and profession of medicine has become increasingly important in the way society is organised. This has led many theorists to speculate on the role of medicine. Ivan Illich (1976) a South American Catholic priest, argued that medicine not only dominated too many aspects of social and moral life but that, far from providing the cure for all our ills was actually making us sick. Illich (1976) also felt that the promise of medical wonder cures had falsely raised public expectations and that the reputation and status associated with medicine and doctors had created a delitating dependency on experts undermining the autonomy and ability of lay people. For Illich medicine had gone too far and was about to reach its nemesis (Illich, 1975).

Irving Zola (1973) writing pointed to the way the discipline of medicine had come to dominate expanding tranches of social life, areas which previously law or religion had regulated. This is termed medicalisation and refers to the way in which social problems such as drunkenness, for example are turned into medical problems i.e. alcoholism. There is considerable evidence to suggest that in contemporary society medicine operates as an institution of social control (Zola, 1972). Medicine is the new repository of truth where absolute and often judgements are made by supposedly neutral and objective experts in the name of health (Zola, 1972). Such judgement go far beyond the diagnosis of disease to influence peoples daily lives, their working, sleeping and eating. Zola considers the role of doctors in the definition of sickness their role in de-stigmatising human and social problems by explaining them in terms of physical or mental disorder rather than immorally or illegitimacy and their increasing applications of the labels 'healthy' and 'ill' to ever expanding areas of peoples lives.

Zola (1972) also argued that the level of patient medicine consumption and growing preoccupation with healthy lifestyles is evidence of how health is a paramount value and therefore how potentially controlling the medical profession has become.

Foucault, in Madness and Civilisation (1965), also studied the way madness was socially constructed and took the notion of medicalisation even further. He showed how punishment had given way to treatment and how that implied the need for constant surveillance and monitoring. This is seen as the basis for new forms of power, which extend throughout the whole of society. He described what he called the clinical gaze as having moved beyond the hospital and the clinic into many and diverse sites such as our schools, workplaces, and homes. For Foucault (1973) the clinical gaze was a facet of a new kind of power, which relied on surveillance and inspection.

In conclusion, this critique has critically examined the view that medicine is a form of social control. Discussing the views of theorists such as Talcott Parsons, Ivan Illich, Narvarro, Irving Zola and Foucault. These theorists have views about how dominating medicine can be in society, the power of the professionals and medicalisation how it refers social problems into medical problems. Throughout this critique, it has been made clear that medicine is a form of social control.