Writing at the Margin: Investigating the Possibilities of Care in the Doctor-Patient Relationship

Abstract

My thesis seeks the possibilities of a healthcare that is attentive to patient lifeworlds. As approved by the Princeton Institutional Review Board, I conducted ethnographic fieldwork at the Clinic, where I observed Dr. Lekan as he saw patients. The Clinic provides free primary care to the uninsured and the underinsured, and Dr. Lekan is the Clinic’s founder, an internal medicine physician concerned with compassion. Based on the seventeen patient encounters I witnessed, I write at the margin (Kleinman 1995) of three tensions: cure versus care, partnership versus paternalism, and the voice of the lifeworld versus the voice of medicine, with specific encounters featured in separate chapters. Through my engagements, I conclude although there are limits to care due to embodied hearing, there is still space for care in the doctor-patient relationship through the relationship building that can occur through knowledge sharing and establishing common grounds via the voice of medicine.