Abstract
This article presents findings from an empirical study among patients and professionals involved in a preventive health program at a Danish hospital. It shows how patients enrolled in the program interact with health professionals in ways that challenge assumptions common to governmentality studies of prevention and health promotion. This literature has successfully explored how contemporary health promotion transgresses the public/private boundary by shaping the values of collectivities and individuals to fit better with public health objectives. By exploring the complex co-existence and intertwinements of discipline and biopolitics in preventive practices, this study eschews an interpretation that views the powers of the professional health system as invasive and one-directional. Perhaps surprisingly, the study demonstrates how patients in various ways defy a ‘patient-centered’ and empowering approach and demand to be treated medically and disciplined in a more traditional sense. The blurring of the public/private boundary, then, cannot be straightforwardly described as a result of a professional health system that, more or less subtly, reaches into the private lives of patients. A more complex picture emerges, as patients’ attitude reflect both traditional medicine and rationalities foreign to the health system.
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Notes
The article is a product of a collaborative work, but Kaspar Villadsen is mainly responsible for the theoretical part, whereas Kathrine Hoffman Pii is responsible for the fieldwork presented.
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Acknowledgements
We wish to warmly thank the two anonymous readers for Social Theory and Health for their fruitful comments and constructive criticism. We also wish to express our gratitude to the managers and staff at the Department of Vascular Surgery at Rigshospitalet, Denmark, for granting us access and letting us observe their preventive work, and to the patients who agreed to participate in the study.
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Hoffmann Pii, K., Villadsen, K. Protect the patient from whom? When patients contest governmentality and seek more expert guidance. Soc Theory Health 11, 19–39 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2012.19
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/sth.2012.19