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Disability, “Being Unhealthy,” and Rights to Health

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2021

Jerome Bickenbach
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Extract

Often advocates for persons with disabilities are resistant to what might appear to be the banal truism that, at bottom, disability is a decrement in health. Disability advocates have long objected to the “medicalization” of disability, when that means focusing entirely on a person’s underlying impairments and ignoring all of the manifold obstacles in his or her environment — e.g., physical, human-built, attitudinal, social, political, and cultural — that makes living with those impairments at least disadvantageous and socially devalued. Over-medicalization is another and well understood problem that people with disabilities are justifiably concerned about. Yet it is somewhat of a mystery why anyone with an impairment would ever deny, or feel uncomfortable being told, that their impairment is a health problem. Surely, people with disabilities are unhealthy, by virtue of their impairments and to the degree according to the severity of those impairments. How could it be otherwise?

Type
Symposium
Information
Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics , Volume 41 , Issue 4 , Winter 2013 , pp. 821 - 828
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Law, Medicine and Ethics 2013

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