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"Actually, I Don't Feel That Bad": Managing Diabetes and the Clinical Encounter
Author(s) -
Ferzacca Steve
Publication year - 2000
Publication title -
medical anthropology quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.855
H-Index - 55
eISSN - 1548-1387
pISSN - 0745-5194
DOI - 10.1525/maq.2000.14.1.28
Subject(s) - hybridity , context (archaeology) , ideal (ethics) , compliance (psychology) , rhetoric , health care , medical ethics , psychology , public relations , sociology , social psychology , political science , psychiatry , law , paleontology , linguistics , philosophy , anthropology , biology
A major issue for persons treating and managing adult‐onset diabetes (NIDDM) is the "problem of compliance." I consider the clinical encounter in the overall context of diabetes management as a punctuated experience focused on the cultivation of an ideal self whose "technologies" and "ethics of self‐care" mimic a capitalist logic that links self‐discipline, productivity, and health. Both clinicians and their patients share and identify with many of the cultural referents and social values that circulate through medical advice and practice. However, using individual examples, I show how this shared logic can produce idiosyncratic regimes of self‐care and clinical practice that result in hybrid medical practices incorporating differing objectives and emphases concerned with a tolerable present or an ideal future. Rather than organizing principles for research and medical practice, I suggest that medical compliance and noncompliance should be considered part of the rhetoric to be explained within the regimes of a pursuit of health. [NIDDM, the clinical encounter, cultivations of self, hybridity]