"Actually, I don't feel that bad": managing diabetes and the clinical encounter.
A major issue for persons treating and managing adult-onset diabetes (NIDDM) is the "problem of compliance." I consider the clinical encounter in the overall context of diabetes management as a punctuated experience focused on the cultivation of an ideal self whose "technologies" and "ethics of self-care" mimic a capitalist logic that links self-discipline, productivity, and health. Both clinicians and their patients share and identify with many of the cultural referents and social values that circulate through medical advice and practice. However, using individual examples, I show how this shared logic can produce idiosyncratic regimes of self-care and clinical practice that result in hybrid medical practices incorporating differing objectives and emphases concerned with a tolerable present or an ideal future. Rather than organizing principles for research and medical practice, I suggest that medical compliance and noncompliance should be considered part of the rhetoric to be explained within the regimes of a pursuit of health.
Ferzacca
S
S
Department of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College, USA. sferzacc@brynmawr.edu
D003924:Diabetes Mellitus, Type 2 / Q000628:therapy*; D006801:Humans; D010349:Patient Compliance; D010353:Patient Education as Topic; D010817:Physician-Patient Relations; D012648:Self Care