Culture, health and communication in the doctor/patient relationship: theory and practice

In the biomedical context the focus on the communication of information is addressed as a strategy to foster patients’ participation in the decision-making process.The aim of this contribution is to reconsider communication in anthropological terms and to question the assumption that communication of information promotes patients’ best interests. In adopting a cultural phenomenological approach, illness is appreciated as a problematic dimensions of one’s existence capable of projecting the person in a context of meanings at risk. In such a framework meaning is not so much something to be communicated in order to help patients to make choices, but rather something that must be produced in order to create experience. The proposal, then, is that of moving beyond the issue of taking into consideration patients’ perspective about their illness, to engage rather in the promotion of patients’ participation in producing a perspective according to which a possible form of action can take place. In conclusion the very issue of therapeutic effectiveness will be reconsidered in arguing how the meaning making process about illness contribute to the very transformation experience itself and can therefore be seen as an integral part of the therapeutic process.