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A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare: Fostering inclusion and active participation through shared understanding
Edited by Sarah Bigi and Maria Grazia Rossi
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 338] 2023
► pp. 144–170

Chapter 6
Pursuing understanding or engaging the patient?

“Making the body speak” as a dilemma-overcoming practice in triadic primary care visits with unaccompanied foreign minors

| Università di Bologna
| Università di Bologna
| Università di Modena e Reggio Emilia
This chapter reports findings from a single-case study on primary care visits involving a general practitioner (GP), three unaccompanied foreign minors (UFMs) with low competence in the language of the visit, and two professional educators in charge of them. Adopting a conversation analysis-informed approach, we illustrate a communicative practice deployed by the GP: “making the body speak”. Through this practice, the physician makes his own or the UFMs’ body multimodally relevant as an ostensibly available and intersubjectively sharable counterpart of words. The analysis shows that this practice is deployed to scaffold UFM patients in reporting their medical history. We advance that, through this recipient-designed practice, the GP overcomes the dilemma of gathering information vs. acknowledging UFMs’ identity as competent patients despite the linguistic gap.
Keywords: triadic primary care visits with unaccompanied foreign minors, dilemma of care, physician-patient interaction, ‘making the body speak’, interactional agency, conversation analysis, history taking
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.UFMs in the Italian reception system and the role of accompanying professional educators
  • 3.Triadic medical visits with UFMs: Asymmetries, agency ascription, and the ‘dilemma of care’
    • 3.1History taking and UFMs: Making the patients report their medical history despite the linguistic gap
  • 4.Using the body as a semiotic resource in healthcare interactions
  • 5.Data collection and analytical procedures
  • 6.“Making the body speak”: Using the body as a semiotic resource
    • 6.1Making the physician’s body speak
    • 6.2Making the patient’s body speak
  • 7.Discussion
  • 8.“Making the body speak” as a dilemma overcoming practice: Concluding remarks
    • 8.1Limitations and directions for future research
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 November 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.338.06car
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Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Gerwing, Jennifer, Sara Healing & Julia Menichetti
2023. Chapter 2. Microanalysis of Clinical Interaction (MCI). In A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 338], ► pp. 43 ff. DOI logo
Thompson, Teresa L. & Wayne A. Beach
2023. Chapter 1. Methodological insights for the study of communication in health. In A Pragmatic Agenda for Healthcare [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 338], ► pp. 16 ff. DOI logo

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