Finger Pricks and Blood Vials: How doctors medicalize ‘cultural’ solutions to demedicalize the ‘broken’ hymen in the Netherlands

• Investigates links between demedicalization and medicalization.
• Unique ethnographic study of 70 hymenoplasty consultations.
• Illustrates the role physicians play in demedicalization of the 'broken' hymen.
• Details doctors' medical appropriation of ‘cultural’ solutions to patients' problems.
• Argues for localized understanding of demedicalization/medicalization process.

This paper provides new perspectives on the scholarship on medicalization and demedicalization, building on an ethnography of hymenoplasty consultations in the Netherlands. By examining how doctors can play an active role in demedicalization, this paper presents novel insights into Dutch physicians' attempt to demedicalize the “broken” hymen. In their consultations, Dutch doctors persuade hymenoplasty patients to abandon the assumed medical definition of the “broken” hymen and offer nonmedical solutions to patients' problems. Drawing from unique ethnographical access from 2012 to 2015 to 70 hymenoplasty consultations in the Netherlands, this paper's original contribution comes from closely examining how demedicalization can be achieved through the process of medicalization. It investigates how Dutch physicians go even further in their efforts to demedicalize by medicalizing “cultural” solutions as an alternative course of action to surgery.