Abstract
The development of information and communication technologies in the digital era has offered many opportunities to transform healthcare. At the same time, it also contributed to a number of changes in the approach of patients and citizens to health and health care.
This text offers an overview of these processes through sociological lenses. The first part focuses on the definition of the concept of medicalization, i.e. the thesis about the increasing role of medical knowledge in viewing common areas of everyday life.
Special attention is paid to the processes of medicalization in the digital era. Specific chapters then focus on three aspects of medicalization that are often articulated in discussions of the relationship between health and digital technologies, and on issues of control, information and trust.
The focus is on patients and specifically their ambivalent position towards their own bodies and healthcare in the digital era. The subsections focus on the informed and misinformed patient, the controlled and controlling patient, and the trusting and distrusting patient.
The conclusion then offers a summary of the debate to reflect on individual aspects and outlines possible research questions for future research