Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
7
Imaging technology and the
detection of 'cold aneurysms'
Illness narratives on the Internet
Gunilla Tegern
Introduction
Medical knowledge and technological innovations are continuously
transforming medical practice and our understanding of health, disease, the
normal and pathological (Webster 2002). Some of the medical technologies
of today, such as the X-ray, seem to be paradoxical in that they can
simultaneously be considered as the latest and most sophisticated version of
an ongoing development of old and well-established tools and techniques, as
well as new innovations that transform medical practice. In order to discover
disease at even more early stages, certain diagnostic technologies, for example
new imaging methods, tend to move the boundary for what is regarded as
normal (Prior 2001). One consequence of this development is that it forces
an increasing number of people without symptoms, but diagnosed as being
'at risk', to take decisions to change their life styles or to undergo treatment
in order to prevent potential illness in the future.
However, in late modern society we may regard the life of everybody
as increasingly infl uenced by medical knowledge and technological
innovations, as suggested by classical studies of the medicalization process
(Zola 1983) and more recently observations of enhancement technologies
(Elliott 2003). Yet, medical sociologists maintain that we at the same time
can observe a decline in medical authority over patients in welfare states
and a 'deprofessionalisation' process (Coburn and Willis 2001). Researchers
have claimed that the demystifi cation of medical knowledge plays a crucial
role in this process. Demystifi cation is supposed to take place when medical
knowledge is reproduced in a form that makes it amenable to lay scrutiny
(Weiss and Fitzpatrick 1997). In a study in Britain, Weiss and Fitzpatrick
observed some consequences of this trend on how GPs experienced their
situation and conclude that: 'The greater perceived challenge to clinical
autonomy comes, not from proletarianisation in the sense of managerial
controls over the content of work but from deprofessionalisation through
lay challenges to professional expertise' (1997: 324).
The image of recent shifts in the relationship between medical experts
and their patients are however both complex and contradictory. Here, I
