Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
This topic addresses the social impact of medical technologies, more
specifi cally how they feature in clinical practice and the meaning they
take on in the life world of practitioners as well as patients, particularly
in the construction of normality and deviance. The authors have differing
backgrounds in sociology, social psychology, communication studies,
phenomenology and the nursing sciences, but are in this topic united in
a 'life-world' perspective. Based on empirical studies of the use of various
medical technologies, and how they are interpreted and communicated in
different professional and everyday contexts, the following themes will be
addressed theoretically as well as empirically:
•
How are medical technologies understood and used by practitioners in
everyday clinical practice?
How are results or outcomes of these technologies communicated in
various clinical settings?
How are medical technologies, and the ways they are used, understood
by patients in clinical encounters and more generally in the context of
their everyday lives?
What is the impact of these technologies on people's notions of health,
illness and normality?
•
•
•
The focus of this topic is not primarily on the sociology of medical
technologies 'per se' - this has been discussed elsewhere (see for instance
Elston 1997; Heath
et al
. 2003; Brown and Webster 2004). Our focus is
on how medical technologies are understood from a life-world perspective,
what consequences it has for communication between medical professionals
and patient, and fi nally how ideas about normality and abnormality are
affected - issues that we want to explore more fully in the chapters that
follow. However, we fi rst want to address the question of 'what are medical
technologies?' and in what sense some technologies are regarded as 'new',
as a back-drop to our inquiries into people's experiences and understanding
of such technologies.
Medical technologies
Medical technologies can be described and categorized in different ways.
Brown and Webster (2004) discuss medical technologies as related to
different fi elds of medical development. '
Information and communication
technologies
', such as the use of the Internet to access medical information
as well as social support, the electronic patient record, sonography and
telemedicine, are characterized by the way they disconnect the experiencing
patient and the corporal body from the medical information about the
patient. Visual images and other data produced by the technology can be
communicated, electronically or otherwise, world-wide and independently
