Body objectified? Phenomenological perspective on patient objectification in teleconsultation
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Date
2023-09
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Abstract
The global crisis of COVID-19 pandemic has considerably accelerated the use of teleconsultation (consultation between the patient and the doctor via video platforms). While it has some obvious benefits and drawbacks for both the patient and the doctor, it is important to consider—how teleconsultation impacts the quality of the patient-doctor relationship? I will approach this question through the lens of phenomenology of the body, focusing on the question—what happens to the patient objectification in teleconsultation? To answer this question I will adopt a phenomenological approach combining both insights drawn from the phenomenological tradition, i.e., the concepts of the lived body and the object body, and the results from the phenomenologically informed qualitative research study on the patient experience of teleconsultation. The theoretical background against which I have developed this study comprises discussions within the field of phenomenology of medicine regarding the different sources of patient objectification within clinical encounter and the arguments concerning the negative impact that objectification has on the quality of care. I will argue that a factor that has frequently been identified within phenomenology of medicine as the main source of patient objectification in clinical encounters, namely, the internalized gaze of the clinician, is diminished during teleconsultation, increasing patient’s sense of agency, decreasing her sense of alienation and opening up the possibility for a closer relationship between the patient and the health care provider, all of which lead to the transformation of the hierarchical patient-health care professional relationship.
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Funding Information: This study was carried out in the context of the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) postdoctoral research project “Healing at a distance: Phenomenological analysis of patient experience of clinical encounter in telemedicine” (No. 1.1.1.2/VIAA/4/20/622). Publisher Copyright: © 2023, The Author(s).
Keywords
Phenomenology, Teleconsultation, Quality of health care, Lived body, Objectification, 6.3 Philosophy, Ethics and Religion, 1.1. Scientific article indexed in Web of Science and/or Scopus database
Citation
Grīnfelde, M 2023, 'Body objectified? Phenomenological perspective on patient objectification in teleconsultation', Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, vol. 26, no. 3, pp. 335-349. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11019-023-10148-w