Magdalena Murawska Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań “A multitude of voices and worlds: Towards a new model of the medical case report.”
ABSTRACT
Patient-centredness is an umbrella term for trends in medical practice that have attempted to redefine the doctor-patient relationship. Two decades ago, the concept of patient advocacy was introduced to emphasise a more empowered role for the patient. This paper problematises the patient’s perspective in medical case reports from professional medical journals. It attempts to determine how these reports are realised at the level of specialist text by looking for linguistic manifestations of the two above-mentioned notions of medical practice. Further, the paper proposes a more patient-oriented variety of case report. In this way, it addresses the conceptualisation of the patient in the written context, something which has received comparably less attention than that of spoken discourse in medical settings studied with a view to improving the quality of physicians’ encounters with patients. Medical texts may not consider communication in the doctor-patient dyad, but nonetheless they refer to patients, and how they do so is critical.