Is global health overmedicalised?

Are we overmedicalising global health? is the title of a recent podcast by Dr Jocalyn Clark, who has also written an article (which I haven't read) on the subject. It's a great question, and one that needs answering. My suspicion is that, as in other policy areas, approaches are too much determined by existing institutions and their outlook and goals. These goals don't always coincide with those of society; sometimes they could even be in conflict with them. In global health, Dr Clark says, there is:

...a medicalisation of these global health problems which occurs when global health issues, which are so strongly linked to poverty and inequity, instead get defined and framed in medical terms and then the solutions developed for them are similarly medicalised.

As society becomes more complex, relationships between cause and effect in physical and mental health, and also in crime, environmental well-being, illiteracy and many other areas, become less easy to identify. But current approaches rely largely on government institutions to make a stab at identifying these relationships and then try to do something to influence them and so improve outcomes. For simple relationships, this can work well and, indeed, government might be the only organization that can deal with certain social and environmental problems. But for complex relationships, especially those that vary markedly over space and time, approaches that rely on government are going to be inefficient at best and in conflict with wider goals at worst. We need, instead, to subordinate institutional structures, outlook and goals to outcomes. And these outcomes must be broad, societal outcomes, rather than those articulated by  existing institutions.

'Health care is but one determinant of health', says Dr Clark, rightly. Targeting broad health outcomes would be a more reliable way of achieving health goals than, as is done now, framing health goals in terms of existing institutions and existing approaches. One solution might be to adopt the Social Policy Bond principle and issue Health Bonds, which would inject market incentives into the achievement of our health goals and reward whoever achieves these goals, whoever they might be, and however they might do so.