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Week 8 - Discussion_Medical Anthropology

Week 8 - Discussion_Medical Anthropology

Q Watch Abraham Verghese’s Ted Talk Called A Doctor’s Touch. Consider the corrective he offers to modern, technocratic medicine. His key message about the centrality of listening to the patient and engaging in a thorough physical exam ties together much of what we have talked about regarding ritual and the culture of biomedicine this past week. What do you think of the term he coined – the “i-patient”? Does this concept resonate with you and your experiences with US-style biomedicine (or perhaps someone close to you)? If so, how so? If not, why not? What do you think is the single most important message you would like to take with you if you are on a journey to become a care provider? If you are not, what would you most like your physician/s to hear and understand from this section of the class?

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In healthcare, it is very important to sense the patient closely and as much as needed, because without a physical diagnosis it remains kind of incomplete as to what extent there is a possibility of impact for the patient and actually the ailment is. The ‘i-patient’ is the virtual form of the real patient that the doctor checks, but since reliance on technology has become necessary to decode the illness and the path to treatment, this ‘i-patient’ is more useful than the actual one lying on the bed. This would obviously resonate with me or for that matter anyone because this is what the culture of medicine today is, where the treatment process and the method of healing are incomplete with technological intervention and deciphering the ‘i-patient’.