Embodiment in the practice and education of health professionals

Abstract

In this chapter, embodiment is explored as a means of coming to a deeper understanding of what occurs in the clinical encounter between patient and health professional, together with what health professionals must learn in order to manage such encounters. Using a real encounter between an oral surgeon and a ‘difficult’ patient as a framework, embodiment is used to open up our thinking about the relationship between bodily experience and our attempts to articulate the meaning of that experience. Participants in a clinical encounter must work together, by using their embodied experience, along with their attempts to narrativise that experience in both the past and the present, if there is to be mutual understanding. Using embodiment as a focus enables us to see that participants use multiple ontologies and epistemologies to dialogically construct a local reality that is contingent and emergent from the clinical encounter itself. Aspects of this localised reality include the rituals that the clinician must bodily enact and the different timespaces occupied by the participants. Embodiment also gives us insights into the complex ways that medical technology can shape the clinical encounter. The clinical encounter is no longer to be seen as a simplistic exchange of information. Through embodiment, we can start to open up the subtleties and nuances that characterise the complexities of the relationship between patient and clinician.