CMNS 304W Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Michel Foucault, Anne Applebaum, Sluggish Schizophrenia
8 May 2018
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Medical Discourse, Therapeutic Discourse and Social Control
Medical Discourse: Key Ideas
• Medicine is an institution of social control.
• What gets diagnosed as a disease is usually the product of social, political and ideological
factors.
• The inter play of class, gender and ethnicity shapes medical discourse in ways that are often not
noticed or questioned critically.
• Through medicine is framed as a scientific, neutral and purely technical practice, it serves to
enforce compliance with certain social and ideologically biased roles.
Medical Language
• What is not known is considered to be either not treatable, or not relevant.
• Communication assumes a mono-logic, or one-way character.
• As a result, medicine has come to replace the patient as a communicative being, with the
patient as organic tissue.
Symbol (secondary qualities)
• Subjective in character:
o Pain
o Dizziness
o Nausea
o Depression
↓
Signs (primary qualities)
• Objective symptoms that can be measured and verified scientifically:
o Changes in skin color
o Heart rate
o Odours
o Concentrations of chemicals in the blood
Patients who are well informed or highly inquisitive are deemed to be mentally unstable. They are
labeled hypochondriacs.
• Physicians are trained to filter our many kinds of complaints as psychosomatic → based on
statistics.
• By doctors maintaining patiets leel of otrol of uderstadig, edial pratie is ale to
manage patient behaviour.
According to Elliot Mishler (The Discourse of Medicine; dialectics of medical interviews, 1984: 128)
• Voice of Medicine – how physicians communicate
clashes with
• Voice of the Life-world – how patients communicate
…resulting in →
• Asymmetrical communication – in which one person has the dominant position and is granted
the privilege of determining the meaning of the other person's discourse.
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Document Summary
Symbol (secondary qualities: subjective in character, pain, dizziness, nausea, depression. Signs (primary qualities: objective symptoms that can be measured and verified scientifically, changes in skin color, heart rate, odours, concentrations of chemicals in the blood. Patients who are well informed or highly inquisitive are deemed to be mentally unstable. They are labeled hypochondriacs: physicians are trained to filter our many kinds of complaints as psychosomatic based on statistics, by doctors maintaining patie(cid:374)ts(cid:859) le(cid:448)el of (cid:272)o(cid:374)trol of u(cid:374)dersta(cid:374)di(cid:374)g, (cid:373)edi(cid:272)al pra(cid:272)ti(cid:272)e is a(cid:271)le to manage patient behaviour. According to elliot mishler (the discourse of medicine; dialectics of medical interviews, 1984: 128: voice of medicine how physicians communicate clashes with, voice of the life-world how patients communicate. Resulting in : asymmetrical communication in which one person has the dominant position and is granted the privilege of determining the meaning of the other person"s discourse.
