Medical Communication during Home Care Visits

How are Patients' Accounts Solicited during Massage Sessions?

Abstract

Currently, the purpose of caring services is to enhance patients' quality of life. To sustain patients' lives, practitioners must proceed with services based on knowledge about how patients conduct their daily lives. Using conversation analysis, this study investigated how practitioners solicited information about patients' behavior from them as an account of their bodily conditions. In my data from home visit medical massage sessions, when massage therapists noticed a new problem in a patient's body, the patient accounted for it by a particular recent event. Here, massage therapists' professional diagnostic perspective is limited, so they solicit further accounts from the patient. This practice can promote patients' participation in diagnostic reasoning because the success or failure of the reasoning depends on the production of patients' accounts. However, this practice, which confers the right to discuss how patients conduct their daily lives, also problematizes patients' interior lives. This study describes a practice in which practitioners and patients collaborate to understand a patient's bodily condition based on the patient's daily life.