THealthcare, like any care, is the product of what people can do and who they can be for each other in the midst of suffering. The relationship of people attending to suffering finds its most direct expression in contemporary healthcare in the relationship of patient and clinician. The ways in which these two come together lies at the heart of how we conceive of and organize the healthcare enterprise. If we conceive of the meeting of patient and clinician as rooted in the knowledge and expertise of the medical expert then we may establish paternalistic and patriarchal structures and relationships by which to deploy that knowledge. Beyond this, we may seek to improve and innovate healthcare by heightening the knowledge, technology, and efficiency of the medical expert. Alternatively if, in the coming together of patient and clinician, we focus attention on the demands of the patient who is commissioning and paying for care we may set the suffering person in the role of consumer. Let the buyer beware then becomes the organizing principle, a principle that calls for an empowered patient equipped with authority, information, choice, and control in the face of illness. This is a situation in which we think that if the suffering person would and could only be more—more knowledgeable, more assertive, more discriminating as a purchaser—then illness would be less.
There is a third possibility in the coming together of patient and clinician. In this way, the joining of people is called for by the situation of suffering. The reason for healthcare is not the deployment of technical expertise, or the exercise of choice. The reason for healthcare is to attend to the challenges of suffering. This is the reason that in clinic rooms throughout the country and world patients and clinicians sit together, talk, and together take action in attending to suffering or the threat of suffering. In this collaborative research with the Knowledge and Evaluation Research (KER) Unit at the Mayo Clinic, my collaborators and I explore the hypothesis that the medium in which this relationship is made productive and caring is conversation.
In collaboration with Dr. Ian Hargraves, Mayo Clinic.
[1] Ian Hargraves, Maggie Breslin, Nassim Jafarinaimi“Shared Decision Making Called for by the Situation of Suffering.”