Over the years, medicalization has developed into a system of societal categorization and grouping of people. In today's society, medicalization serves three main purposes: to treat illness, to define social norms and to limit social deviance. While medicalization is of course a tool and method used to treat illness and disease, over-medicalization of disorders has resulted in medicalization bleeding into our everyday lives, becoming a way for us to use disease and disorder to define what is and should be normal. This has also led to medicalization being used as a tool to define what is not normal and to attempt to control undesirable social behavior(s). While the process of medicalization has remained ultimately the same over time, it has resulted in a multitude and changes within our social systems and the way we define different aspects of our .
The primary purpose of medicalization is supposed to be able to identify and treat disease and illness. Take, for instance, medicalization within the mental health field. In the past, medicalization has been used to define many different mental illnesses and metal disorders. Changes in medicalization over time have resulted in changes in the definition of certain mental disorders, especially as they are defined within the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Medicalization is a process meant to define what is healthy and find people who do not fit into this category of what has been defined as healthy in a way to diagnose and treat these people. Boorse defines being healthy as simply functioning normally. He argues that health is only determined by empirical facts and that is does not depend on evaluative judgment. This is what the purpose of medicalization is: to use facts and observations to identify possible symptoms of illness within a person. Medicalization provides society with a system to do just as Boorse says and diagnose illness based on facts instead of judgment.