Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
A distinction between two kinds of health risks is usually made: those arising
from the environment and those resulting from individual lifestyle. While
environmental risks are regarded as externally imposed on a person, lifestyle
risks are related to what a person does or does not do. Anne Kavanagh
and Dorothy Broom (1998) have suggested a third kind of risk, embodied
risks, or corporeal risks, which they locate in the body of the person who
is said to be 'at risk'. This kind of risk imposes a threat from within.
While
both environmental risks and lifestyle risks just indicate a threatening future
disorder, embodied risks signify a disorder simultaneously in the present and
the future (1998: 442). And while people may identify themselves as being
'at risk' due to environmental and lifestyle factors, medical technology is a
condition for the discovery of an embodied risk and also creates the patient
'at risk'.
As is already evident, a 'cold' aneurysm is not a diagnosis that says
something about the causes of signs and symptoms, it is a risk diagnosis. In the
clinical encounter the formerly symptom-free individual will be transformed
into a patient 'at risk'. Even though we can assume that the doctor in charge
will do her best to manage the uncertainty when informing the patient about
the condition and prognosis, there is an avalanche of information available
in public space telling its own stories. If newly informed patients want to
understand more about their condition they can turn to the Internet and fi nd
a variety of information sites addressing patients and their relatives. One
of these is the already mentioned Aneurysm Support Homepage with the
link to the Brain Aneurysm Narrative-site. The homepage has become the
cyberspace of a social world. There are many things to say about this social
world but here I will confi ne myself to saying something about conceptions
of aneurysm, or to be precise, about some elements in a social representation
of aneurysm as an embodied risk that is coming into existence and will
potentially infl uence site visitors that have recently been informed that they
have a 'cold' aneurysm.
The social psychologist Serge Moscovici, founder of the theory of
social representation, has pointed out that people do not simply perceive
and process the information they receive, but also ask questions and seek
answers about topics that concern them (Moscovici 1984). According to
him and other researchers defending the social representation theory, the
cognitivist view of the human being is a simplifi cation because society is not
a source of information but of meaning (Moscovici 1984; Joffe 2003). Social
representation theory (SRT) offers a way to understand the construction
of collective and shared meaning and how common sense and everyday
knowledge is produced and structured in public and everyday life. A key
concern within SRT is how scientifi c knowledge about a phenomenon, such
as for example 'intracranial arterial aneurysm', will be transformed when it
moves from a reifi ed, scientifi c context to the public space and turns into
everyday thinking, a form of knowledge with its own logic. Moscovici (1984,
2000, 2001) has suggested that two fundamental mechanisms infl uencing
