Impacts of the Medical Model

Medicine — and the medical model — has a profound impact on disabled people’s lives, extending far beyond the doctor’s office or hospital. Abby Wilkerson (2002) shares the story of a young woman with an intellectual disability who felt the need to ask her doctor’s approval before getting married. “Her experience reflects the widespread social reliance on medical discourse as a source of moral, not merely scientific information. The challenge to the medical profession and to related institutions is to become self-critical of discursive practices in the field that undermine the status and the self-regard of particular groups” (Wilkerson, 2002, p. 35).

We navigate messages, architecture, and policies that reinforce the assumptions inherent in the medical model as part of everyday life. Medicine’s influence is powerful and pervasive, operating even at the threshold of life itself — for example, in decisions about which pregnancies are considered fit to carry to term, who is deemed deserving of ventilator support, and who is eligible for medical assistance in dying.

Naturalizing and Depoliticizing Disability

In addition to framing disability as a deficit to be addressed through medical intervention, disability scholars have shown how the medical model treats disability and health as objective facts—seemingly observable, fixed, and separate from wider social relations. By contrast, Bailey and Peoples’ (2017) scholarship presents health as “both a desired state of being and a social construct necessary of interrogation because race, gender, ablebodiedness, and other aspects of cultural production profoundly shape our notions of what is healthy” (p. 3). In other words, ideas of health are not fixed or objective, but are influenced by power and social values.

Alison Kafer (2013) shows how framing disability, health, and medicine as indisputable facts depoliticizes them. When something is depoliticized, it is stripped of important social and political context and complexity. Recognizing disability as socially constructed means that disability is fluid—its meaning shifts over time and across different situations or spaces.

Yet how we experience disability is relational; it is “experienced in and through relationships; it does not occur in isolation” (Kafer, 2013, p. 8). This means disability is shaped by our cultures and environments, as well as by other social relations that structure our lives, such as race, gender, and class. This approach to disability also acknowledges that there is no single disability experience. It opens space for an analysis that grapples with complexity and asks important questions about relations of power, challenging taken-for-granted assumptions about success, effort, productivity, merit, and humanity itself.