Language in Clinical Reasoning : Towards a New Understanding

ISBN-13: 9783639125290 / Angielski / Miękka / 2009 / 204 str.

Stephen Loftus

Opis

Clinical reasoning is still poorly understood. This book opens up the subject by looking from the viewpoint of language use. Adopting an interdisciplinary approach, informed by scholars such as Wittgenstein, Vygotsky, Bakhtin and Gadamer, the study utilises a social constructionist approach to reveal that clinical reasoning is primarily a social and linguistic skill, acquired by participating in communities of practice called health professions. These communities of practice have their own subculture which includes an interpretive repertoire of specific language tools and skills. The interpretive repertoire that health professionals need to master includes skills with words, categories, metaphors, heuristics, narratives, rituals, rhetoric, and hermeneutics. All these skills need to be coordinated, both in constructing a diagnosis and management plan and in communicating clinical decisions to other people, in a manner that can be judged as intelligible, legitimate, persuasive, and carrying the moral authority for subsequent action. The book will be of interest to educators and practitioners in the health professions.

O autorze

Stephen F. Loftus BDS, MSc, PhD: has a background in dentistry
and medical education. He researched clinical reasoning at the
University of Sydney while working in the Pain Management and
Research Centre. He now works as Deputy Director at the
Education For Practice Institute at Charles Sturt University,
Australia.