Building a Case for Centered Patient-Physician Communication: Standardizing Genuine Interaction in the Medical Context

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Rhetorics of health and medicine—both official and vernacular rhetorics—often enter into dialogue with one another during patient-provider interactions. During the patient intake interview, for example, vernacular rhetorics used by patients to describe personal experiences of health interface with official rhetorics of medicine used by healthcare providers to diagnosis and treat illness. For example, a patient may come in complaining about sensitivity to light, a throbbing headache, and “a sharp pain that’s piercing behind one eye,” a physician would label this condition a “migraine with aura” and in doing so indicate to other medical professionals that some prescription drugs (like certain types of birth control) exacerbate symptoms that could lead to stroke. The significance of this communication interface is that through these types of interactions larger structures of health and illness are defined by both parties. In the migraine example, by using labels, pain gets linked to a level of severity, a gendered drug option, and a threatening condition. Since these labels can now be accessed by the patient to explain his or her condition to others, this type of interaction suggests ways that the field of medicine actively influences the course of U.S. culture, with respect to health, through individual patient contact (Conrad, 2007; Lupton, 2007; Showalter, 1997).