This timely and assured text provides lecturers and students with a well informed, penetrating analysis of the key questions in medicine and society. The book is divided into three sections. It opens with a well judged account of the context of health and illness. It moves on to examine the process and experience of illness. Finally, it examines how health care is negotiated and delivered.

Doctor-Patient Relationships

Doctor-patient relationships

Chapter Summary

This chapter describes:

  • how much illness provokes help-seeking from non-medical informal quarters;
  • how doctors and patients frequently disagree over the appropriate process for a medical consultation;
  • how the nature of the relationship between doctor and patient has been analysed as
    • unequal but socially functional;
    • inherently conflictual;
    • based on negotiation;
    • becoming more consumerist in nature;
  • how doctors maintain control of consultations in terms of how the discussion is conducted and recorded in medical notes.

Useful Terms for this Chapter

internetitis: derogatory term to describe the condition of patients who bring information garnered from internet sites, as well as their symptoms, to medical consultations

medical dominance: the authority and autonomy of medicine that permit its domination of other occupations involved with healthcare and confer an advantage ...

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