The medicalization of anthropology: a critical perspective on the critical-clinical debate.

The recent intensity of debate between clinical and critical perspectives can be attributed, in part, to increasing job competition among medical anthropologists in an unfavorable economic climate. If, as analysts predict, a decline occurs in academic and health sector jobs over the next few decades, the increasing medicalization of the field of anthropology will have unintended negative consequences. Awareness of these economic conditions may allow for some degree of disciplinary and theoretical rapprochement.