It takes a lot of strength and determination to pursue a career in the health care field. I really admire doctors, nurses, CNAs, and all others in the field. Our health is very obviously important and having good and ethical people providing us with the healthcare we need is often times essential to our existence. A topic that is really important within this field is "Care". The book defines care as "the communicative action or practice that links to the good of responsiveness to the Other."(199). When we get sick we lose a bit of our health and seek to get it back with attentiveness to the nature of the response, therefore seeking care.
It is very very important to me and many other people that health care remains ethical. I trust that when I tell my doctor embarrassing things about my health that they will not tell the entire community. I also trust that my doctor will listen to what I have to say about my health engaging in listening, attentiveness, and dialogic negotiation. This actually happened to me the other week at the doctor. I suffer from occasional back pain and last week my back was really flaring up. It was so bad that I was actually in tears while taking an exam. I went into the doctor and he basically told me that stretching and ice would make this all go away (I had been doing this all week to try to get the symptoms to calm down). I had been prescribed a muscle relaxer before and brought this up to my doctor, he seemed very reluctant to prescribe them to me. Through dialogic negotiation we were able to decide that a muscle relaxer could be the solution even though it was not the most common one. We attended to the historical moment and negotiated a new possibility.
I think that your comment about having to trust your doctor not to tell the whole community about a health issue is interesting. My Aunt works as a nurse and is always telling stories about her patients, yet will never say a name, its always just this patient or that patient. Now after reading your post and this chapter, I start to wonder if event hat is unethical. Even though she is not saying the name the information is still getting out. Trust is also interesting since normally it takes a lot of time to build between two people, yet with doctors it has to be there from the get go.
ReplyDeleteMacall, I found you blog post very interesting and I loved your examples. I agree with you when you said, communication ethics plays a huge role in health care than most would realize. At some point in everyone's life, they will become ill and need to seek care. As you said, confidentiality is also very important to me, as most others, that when I go to the doctor my information will be kept between my doctor and me. I have two cousins that work in an assisted living, and they never talk about their patients, which I think is reassuring. Because my grandma is in an assisted living home, I would be so irate if the workers at her home were telling their friends, neighbors, or even social media about what she's done, due to her Alzheimer's. I think now with social media, health care professionals should be set to a higher standard when it comes to that sort of thing; they are dealing with someone's life issues and that isn't anything to mess around with.
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