Communication in Healthcare: Habermas and Lévinas at the medical office

Abstract

From the presentation of three clinical cases, this article aims to show that discursive patterns and meanings built throughout the clinical practice comprise a wide range of forms and events, and poses a critique of Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities theoretical frameworks. The intention is to demonstrate that determining narratives as a health professionals’ privileged object of study, using quantitative methods to measure their efficiency or even considering them mere instruments to achieving therapeutic goals or empathy is to impoverish the debate in the field that Hyden and Mishler have called "Language and Medicine". Also, the conduction of clinical encounters exclusively under a linguistic analysis is insufficient, considering the biomedical science that grounds them.  These questions refer to the relationship between epistemology and ethics, which always permeated the core of medicine. In this sense, Jürgen Habermas’ and Emanuel Lévinas’ philosophies (the first, starting from a theory of language build up an ethics of the encounter, and the second, in opposite, from the ethical interaction among people proposing a theory of knowledge) can offer a more solid basis for the comprehension of the clinical encounter in its technical and discursive aspects, towards a (still) utopian theory of communication in health.