Five years ago, I read an old French book, “Docteur, pour la première fois, nous avons parlé le même langage” dit Christina (“Doctor, for the first time, we spoke the same language”, Christina said).
The book tells a true story of a female in-patient, Christina, in a hospital ward in France, describing dialogues with her doctor. She was a journalist. The book title comes from what Christina said to her doctor one year after they started talking. The title is very symbolic of the asymmetric relationship between a patient and a doctor in a hospital. As the doctor spent time with Christina, his perspectives slowly transformed from biomedical into psychosocial views. He noticed that there was something that a patient could inspire in a doctor.
The book was first published by Hachette in France in 1979, and translated into Japanese in 1985. It’s really a shame that it hasn’t been translated into English.
I am researching the context of patient-doctor interactions. I look at a real-life context of clinical communication, and my view is based on ethnographic fieldwork for understanding what patients and professionals ‘do’ and ‘say’. I am always moved when observing their interactions and listening to their voices. Everybody has a story.
Doctors may conduct research on the same topic. Many doctors who were my research participants were also researching topics on patient-doctor communication. Their views are situated within medicine, sometimes employing conversation analysis, and they often contextualise the data into their medical perspectives.
Over the last few years, the field has evolved in mixed methods for various kinds of contexts, ranging from health discourses of individuals (patients’ talks, adherence to treatment, health literacy, online support groups) to professionals’ practices (institutional talks, inter-professional communication, communication skills training, clinical reports, nursing care), and patient-provider interactions (diagnosis, negotiations, ethics).
Here are my dreams. Research in the field can:
- serve as material to facilitate learning for all healthcare practitioners
- increase public awareness on issues that they didn’t even know existed
- reveal mystery and truth in healthcare practice
- benefit healthcare services with greater success
