Health Consumers and the Clinical Encounter

Abstract

The relationship between the health professional and the patient, or health consumer, and the clinical encounter where this relationship develops, are central to the experience of health care for most people. This chapter explores the history of these roles and the clinical encounter itself, from notions of the sick role and the paternalistic medical encounter, through to twenty-first century models of the active health consumer, and new models of the clinical encounter. A case study of the treatment of complementary medicine in the clinical encounter through conversation analysis is developed. The chapter concludes that although transformation has occurred to the roles of health consumers, who are now expected to co-produce their own good health, and health professionals, whose social status has declined in the contemporary context, nevertheless the entrenched culture of the clinical encounter may continue to act as a hindrance to substantive change.