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Unstable Embodiments: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Patient Satisfaction with Treatment Outcome

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Abstract

Many patients experience aspects of treatment and care as dehumanizing because the body is considered separate from the self and its life context. An attempt to transcend viewing persons in dualistic terms is posed by phenomenologists who focus not on “the body” as such but on what it means to be “embodied.” In this paper, we review the relevance of the phenomenology of the body for health care and report the results of comparing Sally Gadow’s phenomenological insights about body-self unity with a qualitative analysis of patients’ accounts of satisfaction with the outcome of hand surgery. We illustrate the ways in which our findings were and were not congruent with Gadow’s conceptualization of embodiment and highlight aspects that are ambiguous. We conclude that the body-self dialectical relationship should be recast as a body-self-society trialectic and discuss the implications of this new conceptualization for clinical practices.

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Notes

  1. See Leder, “Medicine and Paradigms of Embodiment” (1984); Plager, “Hermeneutic Phenomenology”; and Turner, Regulating Bodies, 151–173. All subsequent references to Leder’s work appear in the text.

  2. See Leonard, “A Heideggerian Phenomenological Perspective.”

  3. See Lupton, “The Social Construction of Medicine and the Body”; and Nettleton and Watson, “The Body in Everyday Life.”

  4. Baron, “An Introduction to Medical Phenomenology.”

  5. See Baron and Leonard.

  6. Cited by Nettleton and Watson.

  7. See, for instance Turner, Regulating Bodies; Radley, “Health Psychology, Embodiment and the Question of Vulnerability”; and Diprose, The Bodies of Women, 102--130.

  8. Gadow, “Body and Self: A Dialectic.” All subsequent references to this work appear in the text. See also Charmaz, “The Body, Identity and Self.”

  9. Charmaz.

  10. See Hudak, “Understanding the Meaning of Satisfaction with Treatment Outcome” and “Testing a New Theory of Patient Satisfaction with Treatment Outcome.”

  11. In addition to Gadow’s “Body and Self,” readers desiring further detail are referred to Berthold-Bond’s Hegel’s Grand Synthesis, 81--91.

  12. Kestenbaum, The Humanity of the Ill.

  13. See also Berg and Gadow, “Toward More Human Meanings of Aging,” 86.

  14. Levin and Solomon, “The Discursive Formation of the Body in the History of Medicine.”

  15. See Hudak, “Understanding the Meaning of Satisfaction.”

  16. See Freund, “The Expressive Body”; Frank, “For a Sociology of the Body”; and Turner, “Recent Developments in the Theory of the Body.”

  17. See Harris, “The Symptomatology of Abnormal Appearance,” and Vamos, “Body Image in Rheumatoid Arthritis.”

  18. Fleischman, “I am …, I have…, I suffer from,” 6.

  19. Brown, “Out on a Limb.”

  20. Verdan, “The Hand in Art,” 128.

  21. Freund, 460.

  22. See Feldman.

  23. See Williams, “Is Anybody There?” and “Beyond Meaning, Discourse and the Empirical World.”

  24. Waldby, “Biomedicine, Tissue Transfer and Intercorporeality,” 241.

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Acknowledgements

The authors wish to acknowledge the anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their insightful comments and the study participants for their thoughtful reflections on embodiment.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Research Scientist, St. Michael’s Hospital and Assistant Professor, Department of Medicine, University of Toronto, 4-036, Queen Wing, 30 Bond Street, Toronto, ON, M5B 1W8, Canada

    Pamela L. Hudak

  2. Health Care, Technology and Place CIHR Strategic Training Program, University of Toronto, 155 College Street, Toronto, Ontario, M5S 3H4, Canada

    Patricia McKeever (Professor, Faculty of Nursing, and Co-Director)

  3. Department of Surgery, Robert B. Salter Chair of Surgical Research and Senior Scientist, Population Health Sciences, The Hospital for Sick Children Professor of Surgery, Public Health Sciences, and Health Policy, Management and Evaluations, University of Toronto. The Hospital for Sick Children, Department of Surgery, 555 University Avenue, Room 1254, Toronto, ON, M5G 1X8, Canada

    James G. Wright (Surgeon-in Chief)

Authors
  1. Pamela L. Hudak
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  2. Patricia McKeever
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  3. James G. Wright
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Correspondence to Pamela L. Hudak.

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Hudak, P.L., McKeever, P. & Wright, J.G. Unstable Embodiments: A Phenomenological Interpretation of Patient Satisfaction with Treatment Outcome. J Med Humanit 28, 31–44 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10912-006-9027-4

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