Certain features of the doctor-patient encounter “medicalize,” and thereby depoliticize, the social structural roots of personal suffering. The critique of medicalization holds that medicine has become an institution of social control, that the health care system helps promulgate the dominant ideologies of a society, and that the doctor-patient relationship is a major site where these developments occur. This paper presents a contextual analysis of medical encounters, drawn from a sample of tape-recorded doctor-patient interaction in medical practice. The doctor-patient relationship manifests problems that arise despite the best conscious intents of well-motivated participants. Conveying the symbolism of scientific medicine, messages of ideology and social control reinforce current relations of economic production and reproduction in work, the family, leisure, pleasure, sexuality, and other areas of social life. Ambiguities within the doctor-patient relationship both reflect and help reproduce broader social contradictions and structures of oppression. The medical encounter is one arena where the dominant ideologies of a society are reinforced and where individuals' acquiescence is sought. A vision of a progressive doctor-patient relationship must include a conception of how that relationship contributes to fundamental social change.
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