Sociology

In the ancient times aging was perceived as a natural, even though rare, advancement of the life cycle. People who attained old age clearly displayed mystical sovereignty over diseases, injury as well as death. Their longevity signified approval by a supernatural power. Due to the high mortality rate of children in the land, they were more often engaged in the most important issues than were octogenarians. This clearly depicts that the old people were healthier than the young. In the contemporary world, life expectancy has greatly reduced due to public health measures and increase of the medical-industrial complex. The absolute magnitude of those living into old age dismissed the perception that old people had supernatural powers. Differing from that notion, their clear weakness and feebleness demonstrated without doubt symptoms of a disorder, referred to as aging. The main objective of thousands of anti-aging scientists is to prolong life warding off the insidious and invasive aging disease as it is perceived by many. Researchers in the medical territory, who view aging as a treatable disease caused by defective genes, are looking into techniques through which old cells may be replaced (Gosselink, n.d.).

Medicalization of Aging
It is without doubt that medicalization of aging transformed it into a serious disease. There are many times when practitioners have been asked to identify a situation where non diseases are treated as diseases giving their answers as aging. Medicalization of aging is extensively spread in the western cultures. Components of the skin that are believed to release unpleasant and greasy odor, detectable only when people attain the age of forty, have been isolated by researchers (Conrad, 2007). Gosselink (n.d.), argues that in the same way other infectious diseases cause the body to produce awful smells, a symptom of contagious old age is its smell. Detection of the awful smell of infectious aging, according to Gosselink (n.d.), is then the ultimate medicalization leading to isolation of contagious old people into sanitized and sterilized nursing homes where the smell as well as the infection can be contained. This is mainly done to reduce the number of those who get infected with the aging virus. Baby boomers have greatly supported the development of long-term-care facilities terming it as a significant step in containing the contagion

Co-morbidity complicates the clinical management of the contagious aged. Due to the fact that disease begets disease, the aged are at a very high risk of developing other diseases such as cancer, stroke, heart disease, and arthritis. The government is faced by a major challenge of securing medical workers, even those who have least qualifications to provide care for the elderly. The turnover of staff in the nursing homes is very high. The absence of promise to eradicate the aging virus have led to those bestowed with the mandate of taking care of the aged, as well as those who would like to take up the course, distancing themselves from nursing homes. The general public also perceives aging as an illness. Those taking care of the aged who are infected with other kind of diseases sometimes feel that these diseases can be contagious, hence do not give them the required care. 

Death, which is the final evidence and outcome of ageing, must now take place under supervision from health care workers in hospitals as most people are not ready to take care of their ailing aged kin. Medicalization of aging transformed the process of dying from a home-based family matter into a sanitized enterprise.  Within hospitals, the elderly are isolated to predestinated places containing only those in the dying process and leaving the dying patient as if they can infect them with old age. Everybody including family members and health care workers are fearful of getting old (Beyler, n.d.).

Gosselink, (n.d.) states that though one may meet hisher death through various ways at an early age in the U.S., about 80 of the deaths occur among old people, making aging the leading cause of ones demise. Aging has got no cure. However, relief from visible symptoms of aging can be obtained through medicalized treatments including face lifts, demabrasion, tummy tucks among many others. Though all these may be done, the disease finally follows its natural course. The outcome of medical interventions that do not withstand aging is death.

The media has not been left behind in depicting aging as a disease. Basing its stand on the fact that aging contagion can be forestalled, the media advertises a wide range of products and services that are aimed at defying aging. These advertisements promise relief from various symptoms as well as the contagiousness of aging to those who are willing to prevent the suffering inflicted upon them by aging. After using these anti-aging products, individuals who were formerly thought as contagious reveal themselves to the society so that they can be readmitted. Even though the media has effortlessly promoted anti-aging products, it is not free from disease-avoidance behavior towards older people who are taken as contagious. The film making fraternity rarely uses old people as actors in their movies clearly indicating awareness that it is not the wish of the society to view the population they mainly perceive as diseased (Gosselink, n.d.).

One of the most important features that those suffering from aging should consider is camouflaging the warning signs in order to avoid discrimination and stigma. An elderly person should read the signs of aging right from the beginning and devise ways of concealing them. Though aging cannot be cured, the destroyed identity associated with it can be warded off for ever through proper interventions (Beyler, n.d.).

A thorough documentation of the threat of contamination by getting close to or touching an infected person has been done by anthropologists. They illustrated how both direct and indirect contact with another person transfers an essence in the law of contagion. They stated that though this essence may be invisible, residues from the source remains. Increased level of contact increases the degree of contamination according to the law of contagion. Young people, time and again, have stated that they do not want to associate with the elderly because they smell awful. Children from their infancy have been taught to avoid touching things that are smelly, because they might be infected. This fear of contamination from touching smelly things has been extended to contact with the aged. It is believed that if one does not touch or get too close to an aged person, heshe will not be contaminated with aging. Professionals believe that parents have taught baby boomers that aging is something to be detested. This makes them view the elderly as transmitters of infectious aging virus thereby avoiding them. Young people after watching documentaries revealing the lives of old people vow that they better die young than live a life they term as disgusting. Young people also detest working together with old people. All this prejudice develops as a result of medicalization of aging as a disease as well as misinformation spread by the media (Beyler, n.d.).

According to Estes (2001), one of the most significant as well as powerful forces in the modern world is medicine. The biomedical model as a standard focuses on personal organic pathology, physiological causes, and biomedical interventions. The medical model is exemplified as one in which illness is interpreted as a direct outcome of failure of organs within the human body. This model is based on the fact that all human malfunctions can be traced to specific causes within the body. It also indicates that the mind and the body play different roles in case the cause of the illness is located within the body. The sociological model allows for consideration of the cultural specificity of medical science. Diagnosis process is an integral feature of illness experience due to the fact that if a condition is recognized through diagnosis, the parameters of normality and abnormality are labeled. Medicalization is the process by which social issues are described as medical problems. This plays a major role of increasing the jurisdiction of medicine. It has been argued by professionals that medicalization is a strategy for enlarging professional supremacy as well as social control. It has been suggested that control of medical social issues leads to development of social cohesion through focusing on curing as well as containing illness that would disrupt life if left untreated. There are various positive aspects associated with medicalization of aging. These include validation, support and a sense of relief. A variety of human problems can be legitimized by medical diagnosis if behavior of a person is understood and blame eliminated through medical examination process. One of the major objectives of medicine is the assurance of compliance with the medical authority. Instability of medical authority leads to emergence of issues concerning social and medical control. As an organization, medicine attains social control over populations that have a high probability of becoming deviant, for example violent people, by enlarging medical categories. Medicine is viewed by many as a form of social control similar to law and religion. Medicalization has a significant political consequence by carrying out functions such as classification of diseases, medical authority, and labeling of diseases and behaviors as abnormal. Medical professional is solely responsible for everything that is defined as illness or medical treatment.

The medical model have greatly contributed in the transformation of health as well as other human needs into goods for particular markets through ways that have promoted development of a highly profitable medical-industrial complex. The search for a silver bullet to cure abnormal medical conditions reflects the tendency of physicians to provide medicines and patients to prefer to be medicated. A very good example is whereby patients instead of changing their behavior to reduce cholesterol levels in the body prefer taking cholesterol reducing medicines. Though the change of behavior and medication has the same consequences, the community has decided to treat diseases through medications. This leads to development of overmedicated society that not only incurs financial costs, but also emotional, social and physical costs as well (Estes, 2001).

Medicalization can also be described using the term Biomedicalization. Through biomedicalization, various human medical problems are classified under the scope of bioscientific medicine together with its equivalent technological inventions. There are two dimensions within biomedicalization that are very important. One of them is the social construction of aging as a medical complication. Aging is taken primarily as a disease or a medical complication as described by physicians. The other dimension is the practice of viewing aging as a medical complication together with the consequent behaviors and policies emerging out of the biomedical conceptualization of aging. The main emphasis of the biomedical model is the clinical treatment in addition to management of diseases of old people as described and treated by medical practitioners all this done while giving little attention to the behavioral as well as social processes and problems associated with aging.

Professionals, as illustrated by Estes (2001), believe that abnormal and normal health is part and parcel of cultural and political development of moral order. Aging is exposed as a way of finding out how moral order is expressed through general decline and impairment of the body. It is very difficult to separate various categories of health and diseases, for example aging, from the scope in which they are entrenched. Definition of health and diseases, normality and abnormality, insanity and sanity differs from one community, culture, and historical period to another. Biomedical model, as per to the primary way of viewing the world of aging, influences everything ranging from research and development of knowledge, public perceptions to policy development.

The circumstances associated with old age have made the society to perceive old age as pathological, undesirable state, and abnormal, notions that in the long run shape the attitude of the people towards the elderly and the elderly towards themselves. When the elderly think of the role they are supposed to play, they become socially withdrawn, inactive, dependent and loose self esteem. They also loose efficiency and self control and this leads to increased social control of the aged. Casting of an individual in the sick role is a very powerful way through which the society maintains the status quo and exacts conformity. There are various factors the influence illness and other problems that face old people. These include income, education, housing environments that are safe and capable of supporting healthy behaviors, opportunities for meaningful human relationships, and lack of financing for rehabilitation. A characteristic feature of biomedical thinking is that it diverts attention and solutions away from studies to comprehend sociological causes of ill health, together with environmental, social and economic elements (Cruikshank, 2003).

Public policy concerning medical care for the elderly is currently based on a medical engineering model. This model constructs health and illness based on a rational system of causes within the perspective of the bodys cellular as well as the biochemical system in spite of the reality that the greatest problem of diseases in old age develop from chronic and not acute conditions. This model basically means that, an expert is required to tackle the problems once they occur and also support the societys increasing investment in technology and medical care as the fundamental factors that determine good health, despite the enlarging body of research that differentiates the importance effect on health in old age, social inequalities among many other factors (Kart, Metress, and Metress, 1992). 

According to Clarke, Mamo, Shim, et al (2000), professionals have depicted a novel biomedicalization involving a shift from the old medicalization of unusual behaviors to a modern biomedicalization of normalcy. Medicalization occurs on the new social, cultural, economic and biomedicine forms of various institutions in addition to conceptual, organizational, as well as interactional levels that illustrate the past. All this can be revealed within the highly privatized as well as multinational context of the society in the early 21st century. With diseases being viewed as actions or behaviors that violate cultural norms under medicalization, dominant conceptions that equate health with what is normally acceptable and defined as normal are critically evaluated.
Biomedicalization has been observed to transfer definitions of badness to sickness. There exists a parallel unification of health, defined as freedom from diseases, as well as rectitude in the modern society under medicalization. Perception of old age and the course of life by means of a lens of diseases and its immediate rhetoric only aggravates the increasing trend towards perceiving old age as something that requires to be done away with or controlled. This leads to the development of a challenge for policy makers for health and matters concerning aging, gerontologists, the whole society and individuals. This increases the already existing stigma of older people as well as aging. Biomedical model of aging plays a very big role of generating an understanding of relevant social in addition to biological dynamics that thoroughly shape both old age and aging as experienced by people and as treated by the society by means of social policy (Clarke, Mamo, Shim, et al, 2000). 
Serious debates exist regarding the biomedicalization of specific conditions especially aging. It is heavily debated whether senility is the site pathology or just an acceleration of normal aging process. It is argued that, it is very difficult to differentiate dementia from the normal aging process. Any attempts to separate the two therefore, are seen as methods of trying to generate order in the intricate world of dementia. A historical shift of biomedical conceptualization of Alzheimers disease, as illustrated by Lambrix (2006), has been illustrated where the disease is labeled as a specific disease category, thereby reversing the notion of decline of cognitive ability as a feature of old age that cannot be avoided and thus bringing aging into the purview of medicine. Actually, the description of Alzheimers disease as the causative factor of senile dementia acts as a sign of biomedical claims to the diagnosis and management of old age.

As asserted by Gilhooly, Zarit  Birren (1986), the politics of Alzheimers disease has also been analyzed whereby people who are interested in creating novel disease categories develop facts. This analysis have led to an increment in the number of cases of what is currently referred to as Alzheimers disease and also led to its being taken as an important social as well health problem. The outset of the relation between aging and health allow for social, cultural and political images of old age. The process of identifying Alzheimers disease indicates that changes in cognitive ability associated with old age are as a result of particular disease processes that can be put into various classes, understood and prevented. For that reason, the biomedicalization of senility is implied in the designation of Alzheimers disease as a societal and health problem that indicates economic, biomedical and social imperatives to prevent disabilities in old age. Consequently, both historical as well as modern contestation concerning the definition of conditions such as Alzheimers disease is both unavoidable and chronic during times of medical dominance. The predominance of directing focus to the illness rather than to the individual is carried out in the interest of a profession to put into effect the necessity of the authority granted to scientific medicine. 

Even though diseases that occur in old age leading to extreme loss of cognitive ability, undergoes a disease process for which biomedical studies may hold a key to an eventual cure, the dependence on a biomedical model to exemplify experiences of illness that results to loss of cognitive ability fails to see the social construction of loss of cognitive capability and the effect of treatment as well as care contexts on the progression of the disease and first hand accounts of individual experiences. The biomedical view of loss of cognitive ability is narrow, limited and at times unclear in its ignorance of social forces that impact the description, production and progression of loss of cognitive ability.  The biomedical model has greatly held back resources that might be utilized to go after promising alternative social, environmental along with behavioral approaches while instead encouraging the one cure for all mentality of Americans looking for the paradise of a happy and eternal life (Estes, 2001).

Conclusion
In the past, aging was taken as a natural phenomenon. It was seen as an approval by a supernatural power and those who attained it clearly displayed mystical sovereignty over diseases, injury and death. However, this fact came to be disputed and the absolute magnitude of those living into old age dismissed the perception that old people had supernatural powers. Their weakness and feebleness demonstrated without doubt symptoms of a disorder that was referred to as aging. This was the beginning of medicalization of aging which transformed it into a disease. Death was taken as the final outcome of the aging process. The teachings provided by parents to the baby boomers as well as numerous advertisements by the media have played a major role in depicting aging as a disease. Scientists also view aging as a treatable disease that results form defective genes. Medicalization of aging transformed the process of dying from a home-based family matter into a sanitized enterprise. Many aged people are concentrated in nursing homes with an aim of containing the contagion.