PhD Courses in Denmark

Course content

Medical technologies are advancing rapidly, while expectations of individuals to monitor, optimize and take responsibility for their own health continue to grow. Digital health technologies, wearable devices, artificial intelligence, direct-to-consumer testing, and self-assessment tools increasingly encourage people to seek medical evaluation long before symptoms arise. At the same time, population screening programmes are expanding, diagnostic thresholds are changing, and new diagnostic categories continue to emerge. Together, these developments mean that ever larger parts of everyday life become subject to medical attention, creating new opportunities for prevention and treatment, but also increasing the risk of unnecessary diagnoses, investigations and interventions.

This interdisciplinary PhD course provides a critical introduction to medicalization, overdiagnosis and overuse in both somatic and mental healthcare. Drawing on medicine, epidemiology, sociology, anthropology and science and technology studies (STS), the course examines the mechanisms, rationales, incentives and unintended consequences that drive expanding healthcare utilisation in contemporary societies.

The course addresses questions such as: - Why do more people become patients despite improvements in population health?

• How do technologies, diagnostic criteria and risk concepts reshape ideas of health and illness?

• What roles do governments, healthcare professionals, insurance companies, commercial actors and social media play in expanding medical care?

• How can researchers critically investigate the boundary between beneficial and unnecessary healthcare?

The topics will include:

• Medicalization

• Health culture and neoliberal health politics

• Self-monitoring, AI and ”digital health”

• Population screening, risk prediction and preventive medicine

• Overdiagnosis, overtreatment and overuse in somatic and mental healthcare

• Social media, self-diagnosis and the communication of disease awareness

The course combines short lectures, interactive group discussions, and analysis of empirical cases from epidemiological and social science research. Participants will engage with seminal and contemporary literature from medicine, sociology, anthropology and STS, offering different disciplinary perspectives contributing to a shared understanding of one of the most significant challenges facing contemporary healthcare systems.