Medical Training as a Transformative Experience: A Novel Perspective for Dehumanization in Medicine

• In Event: Rethinking Health Professions in the 21st Century: Innovations, Interruptions, and Regenerations

Abstract

Going through a professionalization process is a transformative experience in the sense that it transforms who one is in a deep sense. My interest is focused in med-students’ transformative experience during medical training in Mexico. Based on ethnographic research (26 interviews with medical students, general practitioners and specialists, and 3 years of virtual ethnography in Facebook), I show that med-students undergo tough medical training that consists, among other things, in a transformative experience that dehumanizes them and this, in turn, enables patients’ dehumanization. With a multidisciplinary approach to medical training, I present a novel account for STS to explain dehumanization in medicine, grounded on Lindemann’s socio-narrative account on personal identity. This philosopher (Lindemann, 2001, 2014) claims that personal identity is constituted by narratives that display the various facets of who the person is, including socially shared stories—viz. master narratives that refer to social identities—and particular or localized narratives that depict how an individual differs from others. During medical training, med-students incorporate master narratives on doctorhood and patienthood. As my empirical results show, the former represent physicians as suprahuman beings with capacities that go beyond human nature (e.g. having the capacity of performing surgery with sleep-deprivation), whereas the later represent patients as subhuman beings with capacities that underestimate their capacities (e.g. lacking the rationality to decide on one’s behalf). These narratives constitute dehumanized identities for both doctors and patients, which are the base of the oppressive medical practices that have been traditionally framed as “dehumanization in medicine”.

Author

• Marcia Villanueva Lozano, UNAM