Opening questions
What should be the first question you ask me as I sit down in your surgery? This is an issue raised by the oncologist, Martin Stockler in a comment under the previous post. Apart from the usual ‘It depends.’, I would like to try and offer linguist’s more detailed view on this.
Discourse analysis for medics
This post is a response to a challenge. A few months ago, two GPs threw a gauntlet for me to write a crash course of discourse analysis. And so, here it is. Discourse analysis for the medic. Continue reading “Discourse analysis for medics”
Detention and responsibility
I was recently struck by how pernicious the word ‘sectioned’ is. A little past participle referring to putting a person under the psychiatric lock and key, instead of referring to (psychiatric) detention, it refers to a section of the Mental Health Act. So I wondered how psychiatrists themselves talk about it. And this is what I want to write about it today.
Ignoring the narrative
Every day my Twitter timeline is full of ‘listening to the patient’, in some cases to the ‘patient’s narrative’. You need to listen, you must listen, it’s good to listen, I listen, they listen, you listen. You could think the medics just about only listen. And so, today I want to write about the opposite, about not listening or ignoring the patient’s narrative.