From Person to Patient : From Patient to Person?

Abstract

'Thank you, I feel so much more like a person now,' I told the ICU nurse after the morning bathing. The words came out spontaneously, and she was startled. What made me feel 'more like a person' at a time when my life was at risk, and I was tied to machines and entirely dependen on others' care? If becoming a patient entails the experience of vulnerability and ultimately the exposure to one's mortality, how does a patient remain a person in the midst of acute illness? Can a patien remain a person if she is regarded primarily as a mal-functioning body and/or mind? To what extent is the patient's self-perception shaped by others' perceptions of her? Can she contribute to the reshaping of those that prove harmful? By arguing for the need to listen to the patient's 'biological and biographical stories' in the interest of good clinical practices, John Launer pinpoints the limitations of a biomedical approach that splits the body from the person, and argues for the need to reconnect biologu and biography within the therapeutic relation. Yet, one of the most striking conclusions of Robert Klitzman's study on doctors who became patients is the stigmatisation of patienthood among the medical profession. Not only did doctor-patients feel diminished as patients and experienced the dissociation between body and person, but they also complained of the split between body and person thus seems to find a correlate in the physician's split between the professional and the personal, and both may be symptomatic of pervasive cultural practices. This chapter considers the intra- and interpersonal processes whereby the patient seeks to remain a person, and the extent to which this may be facilitated by nurturing therapeutic relationships.