Nursing Students’ Opinions on the Conditions, Behaviors and Natural Biological Processes Which Are Being Medicalized

Abstract

The article is the presentation of the initial analysis of the results of research on the level of medicalization of nursing students’ opinions towards selected conditions, behaviors, and natural biological processes, which are being medicalized. The study group seemed interesting to us, because it consists of people undergoing both medical training and shaped in the spirit of the holistic paradigm of nursing care, which should lead them to thinking about human and his problems not only in medical terms, but also in psychological and social. On the basis of six being medicalized conditions, behaviors, and natural biological processes (depression, compulsive buying, erectile dysfunction, childbirth, osteoporosis and obesity) we assessed the degree of medicalization of opinions of respondents. Depending on the example of the problem, the results are very different. Nursing students, on the one hand, have a very medicalised view of osteoporosis (more than 60% consider it as a disease), and on the other hand, rarely define depression in this way (depression as neurological disease is treated by only 17% of them). Moreover, by comparing the responses of students in the first year (undergraduate) and in the second year (MA), we concluded that the nursing studies rather reinforce medicalization of opinions of respondents. We have also come to the conclusion that reliance on the closed-ended questions does not give satisfactory effects: results they are too ambiguous and it is impossible to explain the internal contradictions in the responses of the respondents.