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GENERAL THEMATIC ORIENTATION
The decision to take a medication—whether to relieve physical and psychological discomfort, to prevent illness, to improve health, or to enhance performance—depends on a host of factors, both medical and non-medical, that are constantly interacting. By using a framework that is systemic, constructivist, and critical, the MÉOS team examines medication as social, cultural, and technical object. Our approach is constructivist insofar as medication is viewed as having a “life cycle” during which its roles and purposes are socially and culturally constructed even as it transforms the very context in which it is embedded (Van der Geest et al., 1996; Nichter & Vuckovic, 1994).  The approach is systemic in that only by understanding the whole cycle can we gain a thorough understanding of the “medication” object and all its components. Our approach is critical because we situate medication at the hub of a set of political, economic, cultural, and technical processes that go well beyond the mere therapeutic functions of medication that usually define its utility and accord it its legitimacy.

This approach thus requires examining the development of medications upstream, at the production stage (the pharmaceutical industry, various research settings, and the regulatory agencies responsible for approving new medications as ready for the market), and downstream, where medications become part of standard health care practices, from distribution (both professionals practising in the mainstream health care system and those offering alternative health care at its fringes) to consumption.

With its unique multidisciplinary (sociology, history, psychology, ethics) expertise in medication, the MÉOS Research Team is planning to develop a program with three areas of specialization that will lead to the creation of a new field of inquiry: medication as social and cultural object (shortened to MÉOS in French). In so doing, a permanent home will be created for researchers working on this theme, which is substantive enough both to have its own agenda and to complement epidemiological research on medication use.