In terms of medicalization, what I mean is the provision of medical care--and it plays out particularly in terms of drug treatment--for people who actually don't have an illness, or who are in a situation where they're dealing with normal life, and where there isn't evidence that giving what they have a diagnostic category, a diagnostic name, and then treating it with drugs is actually going to provide a health benefit.
Internationally, we're seeing an increase in the per population volume of prescription drug use. And one of the sides of the national pharmaceutical strategy--my understanding is that it is one of the key aspects--is to try to follow up on drug safety and effectiveness once drugs are on the market. That partly came out of the Vioxx scandal, because you had evidence from the clinical trials that thousands of people had had extra heart attacks, but nobody had noticed because they were mainly looking at elderly people and nobody had followed up. You've had specific follow-ups of stomach bleeding in Ontario and the rate going up after the COX-2 inhibitors came in, because so many more people started using those drugs who weren't using them beforehand.
So I think the concern is that we might be causing more harm than benefit in an individual patient, and that people are often very unaware of just how much benefit they can or cannot expect to get from drug treatment. I don't know if that answers your question.