THE CLINICAL GAZE AND THE BODY IN ILLNESS: ADDRESSING HEALTHCARE DISPARITIES THROUGH AN INTEGRATIVE APPROACH OF PHENOMENOLOGY AND SHARED DECISION-MAKING IN MEDICINE

Abstract

A main challenge in medicine concerns questions of how to integrate the context and values of patient perspectives with general conceptions of illness and treatment. With medicine increasingly focused on patient-centered and individualized care, approaches to medicine must find ways to gain access to and understand the patient in such a way that recognizes her story as real while at the same time maintaining the value of medicine as an objective practice. Adding to this is the reality that under current models of medicine and decision-making in medicine, healthcare disparities persist for persons belonging to marginalized and vulnerable populations, including racial and ethnic minorities, women, and LGBTQ persons, amongst others. I argue that an approach integrative of shared decision-making built upon a phenomenological framework is a good alternative on which to try and understand questions like these and begin to address disparities in healthcare.