Standardized Diagnosis, Absent Bodies: An Analysis of Testing, Diagnosis, and the Writing of Medical Records

• In Event: 2410 - Disability and The Body

Abstract

All diagnosis depends on communication between doctors and patients. This is especially so with behavioral disorders like autism, where structured interactions involving clinicians and children – e.g. standardized testing – play a key role in diagnosing the condition. Although such interactions are collaborative, we find that when reporting test results, clinicians, following administrative protocols, routinely gloss over the embodied interactions constitutive of testing, effectively reducing co-produced performances to properties of the child alone. In this paper, we show how this reduction is achieved in the discourse of official medical records, which disembody the diagnostic process. Then, using conversation analysis, we examine video footage of a multi-stage autism evaluation to illustrate how clinicians progressively abstract a child’s actions from their embodied origins, first in a case conference and subsequently in the final medical report containing her diagnosis. We connect these reductive reporting practices to the organizational features of standardized testing, and clinical administration thereof, and conclude by asking whether, and how, oral and written reports might potentially re-situate children in their social environments – and thereby re-embody their diagnoses.

Author

• Douglas W. Maynard, University of Wisconsin