As far as I understand, discourse analysis is a laborious work through interviewing and analysing the contexts, concentrating on the words, and interpreting. It is a bit like ‘’detective ‘’work, paying attention to the details rather than numbers. Despite all, it seems it is very useful method to stimulate thinking for the psychosocial aspect of illness and improve our understanding for ‘’patient-tailored’’ and sensitive, receptive practice. It is perhaps not the numbers as we used to see or deal with in research but more towards the philosophical way which infuse into our behaviour as practitioners.
I have found a paper from Elsevier about the patients with medically unexplained symptoms and the sources of their authority and implications of their demand in medical care.
I picked this paper as it was originated from the Liverpool with an attractive title that interests me in my general practitioner work.
I have found it very difficult to read and digest hence my conclusion may not be comprehensive. But I will try:
The aim of the study was understanding patients’ use of medical language in their understanding of the symptoms and its effect on the interactions with the doctors.
They recruited 228 patients who had no found cause of their symptoms. They were interviewed by the same person but analysed by several authors.
They included some numbers i.e a table of the breakdown of the symptom frequencies. The rest is categorising the patients’ account of their symptoms and explanations, their own interpretation of illness.
Patients’ appreciation of the doctors who were seen as ally against the disease is suggested as an alternative to the meeting of experts or collaborators in problem solving model of patient-doctor relations is probably the main message of the paper.
I have noticed this is very old paper only at the end! It was published in 1998. This paper and alike are probably drawn into education of doctors since then to influence professional’s attitude in consultations as well as in health policy. Hence there are initiatives locally ( i.e City and Hackney) to contain these patients with the help of psychological therapies.
My conclusion after all is that this was probably not the best paper I could have picked up!
Here is the link:
