2020 Volume 22 Issue 2 Pages 46-61
Conveying the legitimacy of their visit is one of the basic tasks of a patient in a medical consultation. When a patient has already consulted another doctor, complaining about the previous doctor can be used as a resource for justifying the current visit. Making such a complaint is, however, a delicate and risky action because the target of the complaint is someone in the same profession as the doctor and this might elicit a negative assessment of the patient. This paper is a conversation analytic study about how patients handle this dilemma, focusing on the case of a patient with medically unexplained symptoms. It demonstrates that patients manage this dilemma by cautiously choosing when to make a complaint, how explicitly to do so, and whether to design their utterances as complaints or not. Such delicate balancing enables patients to present themselves as reasonable people and to enhance the legitimacy of their visit.
