Medical Model of Disability - Criticism

Criticism

The Medical Model of Disability focuses on the individual's limitations and ways to reduce those impariments or using adaptive tenchnology to adapt them to society. Current definitions of disability accept biomedical assistance but focus more on factors causing environmental and social exclusion. Uncritical reliance on the Medical Model produces unwanted consequences.

Among advocates of disability rights, who tend to subscribe to the social model instead, the medical model of disability is often cited as the basis of an unintended social degradation of disabled people; further, resources are seen as excessively misdirected towards an almost-exclusively medical focus when those same resources could be used towards things like universal design and societal inclusionary practices. This includes the monetary and the societal costs and benefits of various interventions, be they medical, surgical, social or occupational, from prosthetics, drug-based and other "cures", and medical tests such as genetic screening or preimplantation genetic diagnosis. Often, a medical model of disability is used to justify large investment in these procedures, technologies and research, when adaptation of the disabled person's environment might ultimately be more beneficial to the society at large, as well as financially cheaper and physically more attainable.

Further, some disability rights groups see the medical model of disability as a civil rights issue, and criticise charitable or medical initiatives that use it in their portrayal of disabled people, because it promotes a pitiable, essentially negative, largely disempowered image of people with disabilities, rather than casting disability as a political, social and environmental problem (see also the political slogan "piss on pity"). Various sociologists (Zola, Parsons) studied the socio-cultural aspects of "normalcy" and the pressure it exerts on individuals to conform.

The recent World Health Organization ICF Classification (International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health)takes into account the social aspects of disability and does not see disability only as a 'medical' or 'biological' dysfunction.