I just learned a new word. “Healthism.” As in,
Something tells me I don’t want to know what it means.
7 responses to “Healthism”
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Turns out it is a real word from 1980 and used by political economists and professors of medicine (!).
According to Skrabanek, “healthism” begins when the government begins to use propaganda and coercion to establish norms of health and begins to attempt to impose norms of a “healthy lifestyle.” All human activities are weighed in the balance of their real or imagined effects on health.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HealthismLikeLike
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But look at the context. I suspect the word has a new and weird meaning because the context points in that direction.
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Well, I’m a retired medical doctor, and I never heard that specific word in my entire life, until I just read it here. It’s a faux-political term, not medical terminology.
An unfortunate trend among some ‘creative’ writers is to add the suffix ‘ism’ to anything that they want to disparage.
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Yes, that’s what I was thinking. What can possibly be wrong with health?
And all these “fat hatred, body shaming, etc” are beyond obnoxious, too.
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What’s wrong with just saying medicalization? says the Foucauldian. 🙂
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Oh, so this is another word for medicalization! Thank you, finally I get what it means.
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I don’t know if it’s how it’s used here, but I have seen “healthism” used to describe “the bigotted belief that being healthy is better than being sick”, in such contexts as “The medical proffesion is inherently healthist.”
I feel stupider just for having referred to those beliefs
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
Clarissa's Blog 
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