The concept of medicalization has given rise to considerable discussion in the social sciences, focusing especially on the extension of medicine's jurisdiction and its hold over our bodies through the reduction of social phenomena to individual biological pathologies. However, the process leading to medical treatment may start when individuals engage in self-medication and thus practice "self-medicalization." But, can we apply to this concept the same type of analysis as the first and see merely the individual's replication of the social control mechanisms to which he/she usually falls victim? This article aims to demonstrate that the medicalization individuals practice on themselves takes on a completely different meaning to that practiced by the medical profession. Empirical data collected in France show that self-medicalization, which may involve treating a problem medically when doctors believe it to be of a non-medical nature, can be an attempt by individuals to furnish a social explanation for their somatic problems and experiences. In this article, I examine the social and political significance of this phenomenon.

Based on ethnographic research from two distinct French settings, the author examines the lying of doctors, and the lying of patients. The first situation is that of medical practitioners, specialists in the treatment of alcoholism, who affirm to ex-drinkers that it is impossible to drink normally again after treatment, without falling back into dependency, whilst knowing of the existence of contradictory cases. The second situation is that in which a certain number of patients find themselves, and who lead their doctors to believe that they have been taking their medication and dissimulate their real behaviour, that of non-observance of prescription. The author argues that lying, in the context of secrecy, is the expression of and the indication of a power relationship. Moreover, the rationalisation that accompanies the lie does not stop it from producing effects in contradiction to its motivation, thus exposing the conflict between therapeutic logic and social logic: the paradoxical character of lying.

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